I wonder what libraries have the highest circulation, and how many times their average books circulate, and things like that.Are these the kinds of things you consider?
The Loneliness of the Unread Books
I recall learning in Library School that the averages for circulation are around six times during the whole lifespan a book spends in a library.
I was shocked.
After all, the books I was reading were checked out six times while I still had them on reserve!
Then I realized for the first time how lonely average books must be in the libraries, and how lonely people who read them must be, knowing hardly anyone else was ever going to read them, and thus not being able from nearly the same perspective to share what they read.
For the first time, I got some glimmer of why persons I knew joined book clubs…it must be nice to know, and perhaps to talk to, others who read the books.
Reading groups all of a sudden made more sense.
However, I was still too busy reading more and more– so I never joined such groups–though friends did and I never heard about any discussions I would have been sorry to have missed.
How much I missed missing the discussions I imagined, but those apparently were NOT what was taking place.
What About Books by the Millions?
When we talk about libraries, The Library of Congress usually tops all lists, but I wonder if they have the normal kind of circulation other libraries do.
Somehow I always envisioned the LC as reference books that were never checked out in the classic sense.
Then, many years later, I learned that originally the libraries chained the books to the shelves because so much cost went into the books.
Only then did I understand why people used such terms as “lending library” referring to plain libraries.
Sometimes the historical perspective gets lost in the translation of something like “chained libraries,” to “lending libraries,” to what I am starting to name as “personal libraries” in “personal computers.”
What About “Circulation”?
The Library of Congress is probably nearly 33 million books large by now, the largest in the world, by most standards of measure, but I wonder if a “circulation” statistic for them would be equally impressive.
After all, the single largest Project Gutenberg site handed out more millions per year for the last few years than the 33 million books listed as the contents of the LC.
Does circulation make or break a library?
Or does is make any difference?
Obviously the “chained libraries” had circulations of zero books, the books never left the shelves.
Yet we still refer to them as libraries.
So is circulation any kind of a prerequisite for uses of the name “library?”
Or is it perhaps that this is what libraries were one day long, long ago and far, far away, but we are less likely to mean the same thing by using that “library” nomenclature in modern speech.
So, the question here comes down to how much of those “librariness qualities” come from circulation and how much comes from the total number of books?
Not to mention serials, music, artwork, etc.
This is not a subject some take lightly.
Some librarians have very strong feelings that books, serials, music, artwork, do not occupy levels of some equal importance, that some are second rate materials that are not really the core, or corps, of libraries.
Today even those sections are under attack by digital materials such as computer programs, and CDs of music and other materials, not to mention DVDs, Blu-Ray and HD, and other new digital media.
However, we must consider that each of these media in question can hold all of the above materials: music, of course, led off the CD revolution, in which vinyl, something most people hardly remember any more, was a victim of one of the fastest media changes in history as it took only about 4 years from CD introduction to the first year vinyl was relegated to second place.
However, DVDs didn’t take so very long to take over a market share from videotapes.
Is any modern library complete without CDs and DVDs?
We didn’t used to think about movie circulation.
The library had movies, but mostly you went to see an important movie AT the library.
After all, who had big enough home projector?
Today a hundred million people have movie collections that would have been the envy of Hollywood moguls, in their private home screening rooms a few decades ago, and thus the idea of having library movies on DVD for just plain circulation seems pretty mundane.
But go back in time and ask the libraries of 1950 the same questions about movie circulation and you get an entirely different perspective.
The Perspective of Perspective
We have discussed “chained libraries,” and then moved to “lending libraries” just as in historical context, but many people are not intellectually ready for what is obviously the next step:
“The Personal Computer” as “Personal Library.”
According to legal opinions, Project Gutenberg and an assortment of other electronic libraries have been in the definition of “libraries” for over a decade.
However legal definitions, even dictionaries, are not what defines things in reality, and many people, even or especially, those who were the previously involved members of “the library community,” feel invaded by a new medium of eBooks and other electronic copies of a whole set of media previously considered to be really library materials, but the electronic copies are not.
This distinction may be on somewhat shaky grounds.
After all, libraries accepted CDs as worthy of music, and accepted DVDs as worthy of movies, by the million after million after million. I suppose one statistic you might be interested in would be how many of these are in circulation via various library systems or how often they get checked out.
I recall the director of our local library saying the digital media were being circulated more than the old non-digital media, but I don’t have figures on that– I should have saved them!
More Perspective on Perspective
So, if digital music is OK and digital movies are OK, then why such a big stink about digital books???
Perhaps because “books” are the mainstay of libraries at least in the “image” of libraries.
After all, if more music and movies are checked out– that means less books are checked out–and definition of libraries may once again be in flux.
Will libraries ever accept eBooks?
Can they avoid it?
Obviously libraries can hold out for some time.
However, the longer they hold out, the more they will cause the public at large to find other ways to get a digital book, if that is what they want.
Just the same as with music CDs and movie DVDs.
Some people say the average person is reading less.
Other people say the average person is reading more– just that they are doing it on the Internet, etc., in a manner that is not being measured.
Footnote:
We all know the famous American President John Dewey.
No?
Well, when statistical measuring was still in infancy the first polls were taken via telephone because they were faster and cheaper than sending people to doors, all over the country, to take these polls.
However, what was NOT taken into account was that the people WITH telephones voted differently because they were richer, than the people WITHOUT telephones, with less money, and thus a different voting profile.
The rich, famous, debonair Mr. John Dewey is declared the winner, in print, with the famous headline:
“DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”
but the not so rich, not so famous, not so debonair– Mr. Harry Truman–carried the votes via telephoneless members of the voting community, and polls have never been trusted in the same manner again.
Just keep President John Dewey in mind…
What’s the Point?
The point is that that more eBooks will be created in the first 50 years of the new millennium, than in all of the previous history of the world.
Just as there were more paper books printed in the 50 years after The Gutenberg Press got started than in a whole entire previous history of books.
No one can stop eBooks from taking over the world.
No one could stop Gutenberg books, either.
Whether anyone out there MEASURES eBooks meaningfully is not the issue, the eBooks would multiply whether a measurement is taken or not.
Here’s how:
Today it is hard to find serious computer people with anything less than terabytes.
After all, terabytes are under $200.
10 years ago it was hard to find computer people with gigabytes, simply because gigabytes weren’t so cheap, weren’t so easy to hook up, and only the VERY serious computer people went to that expense and trouble.
10 years before that, now back before 1990, it was on the order of megabytes. Only the VERY serious geeks, and not that many of them existed, had megabytes.
I got my first 5 megabyte hard drive in the 1980’s in a great deal for $1500 with power supply & controller from someone who had paid $3,000 for it not that many years earlier, as an add-on for the early Apple.
Ahem! The Point?
The point is that right now terabytes are trivial.
Trivial to buy.
Trivial to install.
Not so trivial to fill up.
Let’s say you download 2 gigabytes per day.
And all of it is perfect, you want to keep it.
It would take 1.37 years, or 500 days to fill it up.
By the time you filled it up, it would be obsolete.
You’d end up with a bigger, faster drive to fill up.
The point is that you could download a million books in same amount of time…actually 2.5 million because an Internet connection now automatically uses compression, and eBooks compress very nicely at over 2.5 to 1.
Ahem!!! The Point???
OK!
The average public library in well-to-do places such as The United States, contains about 30,000 books.
Let’s say a megabyte per book: one million characters.
30,000 megabytes, let’s say 3 to 1 compression to be an easy calculation, 10 gigabytes.
You could download those 10 gigabytes at 2 gigs per day from Christmas to New Year’s Eve, not counting either– just the five days in between.
A whole entire library!
You OWN an entire library!
YOURS!!!
And you can carry it with you for $100!!!
Huh???
Recently I saw a 16 gigabyte USB flashdrive for $117.
Your entire 10 gigabytes of compressed eBooks will fit, very nicely, with plenty of room left over, for a whole DVD full of stuff, and a few CDs as well… .
“A Personal Library”
No muss, no fuss, no big expense.
Of course, if you wanted it even faster, without delays of downloading, you can simply swap three DVDs with one of the people who have already downloaded the eBooks.
People are swapping eBooks all over the planet.
They showed up in iPods in the first week of iPods!
They show up on cell phones.
Did you know there are perhaps three times as many cell phones in the world as computers, PDAs or anything else on the entire Internet?
Cell phones are the connectivity of the future.
Swap a few pieces of RAM from one cell phone to another and you have your “Personal Library” right in hand, and at very minimal expense.
Oh…did I mention something about flash memory???
“NO BATTERIES REQUIRED”…They Never Forget…
Conclusion
Now that these “Personal Libraries” have reached weights of one ounce or less and costs of $100 or less it should be no time at all before anyone who wants one has one.
The idea of having a few dozen books will be replaced by the idea of having a few dozen THOUSANDS of books and it will be obvious to all that more books were created with eBooks than have ever been created on paper.
After that, the only thing remaining will be to polish a whole planet full of such eBooks to the point where some 1% of 1% of 1% who are the scholarly elite accept them.
The Next Big Thing
…to translate all these in the 250 languages that each have over a million speakers.This single project will change ways machine translation is viewed throughout the world, just as OCR changed ways we viewed moving graphics files to text files.
No, I don’t think machine translation will ever be great to the same accuracy levels OCR has been, but close, and good enough to encourage humans to finish translations– just as OCR has been close enough to encourage the human factor to finish transcriptions.
Once this has taken place, with or without the approvals of the 1% of 1% of 1% of the elite scholars, the world’s reading habits will change…forever.
That’s where my goals stop…and others’ begin…
The Next Immediate Big Thing
Mid-2008 should see the release of the USB 3.0 specs and by the end of the year we should see faster flashdrives, which will enable faster copying of “Personal Libraries” and the whole process will shift up a gear.With USB 3.0 you should be able to copy your 10 gigabyte compressed “Personal Library” literally in minutes…!
And hopefully YOU will!!! Over and over and over again, as you SHARE those tens of thousands of eBooks.
The Next Big Number
I have been working on a list of world’s large libraries with an arbitrary cutoff of 7 million books. It seems a few dozen libraries make that cut, and obviously more in each successive year, as they keep growing.
However, in the forseeable future, and not so many years at that, there will electronic libraries with 7 million, and once those get downloaded to the general public, the number of libraries with 7 million books will skyrocket.
Somehow I envision some tactic to keep from including or even mentioning that anyone with a few thousand dollars, could/would/should be able to have a “Personal Library,”
a library they own personally, that sits on their desks, that contains 7 million books.
However, that won’t change the FACT that these libraries actually exist, or than any one of billions of people in the world could have one for 1/10 the price of a car.
Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg