The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco.; The New York Times, August 13, 2023

 David Streitfeld, The New York Times; The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco.

"In the middle of this mess are writers, whose job is to produce the books that contain much of the world’s best information. Despite that central role, they are largely powerless — a familiar position for most writers. Emotions are running high...

It’s rarely this nasty, but free vs. expensive is a struggle that plays out continuously against all forms of media and entertainment. Neither side has the upper hand forever, even if it sometimes seems it might.

“The more information is free, the more opportunities for it to be collected, refined, packaged and made expensive,” said Stewart Brand, the technology visionary who first developed the formulation. “The more it is expensive, the more workarounds to make it free. It’s a paradox. Each side makes the other true.”"

Inside The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy; Library Journal, August 3, 2023

Claire Woodcock  , Library Journal; Inside The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy

"Most libraries don’t own their own ebooks. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to LJ readers, yet it’s a statement that continues to confound elected officials and administrators who get an astounding amount of say in how much money public and academic libraries are allotted.

This is one of the reasons I, along with my coauthors Sarah Lamdan, Michael Weinberg, and Jason Schultz at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at New York University (NYU) Law, published our recent report, The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy: How Publishers and Platforms Have Reshaped the Way We Read in the Digital Age. In nearly 60 pages, this report takes a hard look at how license agreements dictate what consumers—both individual and institutional—get to do with their digital book collections."

The Top 10 Library Stories of 2022; Publishers Weekly, December 9, 2023

Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly; The Top 10 Library Stories of 2022

PW looks back at the library stories that captivated the publishing world this year, and what they portend for 2023

"1. Attacks on the Freedom to Read Escalate

In 2022, a pernicious wave of politically motivated book bans continued to surge in local library and school districts across the nation, with the overwhelming majority of book challenges involving LGBTQ authors and themes or issues of race and social justice. And as a new year approaches, observers say the attacks on libraries and schools are only intensifying.

The numbers tell a disturbing story. In April, the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom released its annual report on banned and challenged books, announcing that it had tracked some 729 challenges involving 1,597 individual titles in 2021—the highest number of challenges since ALA began compiling its most-challenged-books lists 20 years ago. And during Banned Books Week in September, the ALA reported that the number of challenges through the first eight months of 2022 was on pace to shatter the already-record-breaking numbers from 2021...

2. State Legislators Take Aim at Libraries and Schools

In 2022, threats to the freedom to read escalated at the state level as well as the local level, with a host of new state measures targeting the work of libraries.

In March, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1467,which mandates a public review of all public school instructional material, including library books, part of suite of laws signed under the guise of parental rights. In Tennessee, legislators passed HB 2666, which, among its provisions, vests the state’s textbook commission (rather than local decision makers) with final authority over whether challenged works can remain in school libraries. In Kentucky, lawmakers passed SB 167, which critics say will politicize library boards by giving local elected judges broad control to appoint members and veto power over large expenditures.

In Missouri, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft proposed a vague new “Protection of Minors” rule for libraries that would prohibit state funds from being used for materials deemed to “appeal to the prurient interests of any minor.” The new rule follows the passage of SB 775, a recently enacted state law that threatens criminal charges for Missouri librarians and teachers found to have provided “explicit sexual material” to students. In November, PEN America reported that fear of prosecution under the new law has already led librarians and educators to pull some 300 titles across 11 school districts.

And in a proposal sure to get publishers’ attention, Texas state representative Tom Oliverson proposed HB 338, a bill that would require publishers to create an “age appropriate” rating system for books sold to Texas school libraries, while also giving state officials the power to direct publishers to change ratings state officials disagree with, and to bar schools from doing business with publishers that do not comply.

3. Congress Holds Hearings on Book Bans, Introduces a Bill to Support School Librarians

The surge in book bans and legislative attacks on the freedom to read didn’t only register at the state and local levels in 2022—it captured the attention of Congress as well.

In April, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the coordinated attacks on the freedom to read in libraries and schools, and in May held a second hearing focused on schools. At the second hearing, held on May 19, chairman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, forcefully condemned new state laws seeking to ban books and prohibit the discussion of certain allegedly divisive subjects, like critical race theory and the LGBTQ community, calling such efforts “the hallmark of authoritarian regimes.” The laws, Raskin concluded, “are being used to undermine public faith in public schools and destroy one of the key pillars of our democracy.”

Meanwhile, two lawmakers this fall introduced a bicameral bill designed to support school libraries and protect school librarians. Introduced on October 6 by Rhode Island senator Jack Reed and Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva, both Democrats, the Right to Read Act (S 5064 and HR 9056) would authorize $500 million in grants to states to support school libraries in underserved areas. And, crucially, it would also extend “liability protections” to teachers and school librarians, which supporters say is a direct response to the rise in state laws threatening them with civil actions and criminal charges simply for making books available to students.

The bill was welcome news for school librarians, even though with just days left before the end of the 117th Congress it is all but dead on arrival. Advocates say the legislation lays down an important marker for federal action and will be reintroduced in 2023."

After COVID boom, ebook aggregators face licensing questions from Congress; The Verge, November 18, 2021

 Makena Kelly, The Verge ; After COVID boom, ebook aggregators face licensing questions from Congress

"“Many libraries face financial and practical challenges in making e-books available to their patrons, which jeopardizes their ability to fulfill their mission,” the lawmakers wrote. “It is our understanding that these difficulties arise because e-books are typically offered under more expensive and limited licensing agreements, unlike print books that libraries can typically purchase, own, and lend on their own terms.”

In September, Wyden and Eshoo first questioned publishers over the terms they set for ebook licensing. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many public libraries to shut down in-person service, and people began using online services like Overdrive’s Libby app to borrow digital books in lieu of physical copies. “Ensuring that libraries can offer an array of resources, including e-books, is essential to promoting equity in education and access to information,” the lawmakers wrote to Penguin Random House earlier this year."

Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.; The Washington Post, March 10, 2021

Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post ; Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.

 

"Many Americans now recognize that a few tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. But it’s sometimes hard to put your finger on exactly why that’s a problem. The case of the vanishing e-books shows how tech monopolies hurt us not just as consumers, but as citizens...

 

Librarians have been no match for the beast. When authors sign up with a publisher, it decides how to distribute their work... 

 

In testimony to Congress, the American Library Association called digital sales bans like Amazon’s “the worst obstacle for libraries” moving into the 21st century. Lawmakers in New York and Rhode Island have proposed bills that would require Amazon (and everybody else) to sell e-books to libraries with reasonable terms. This week, the Maryland House of Delegates unanimously approved its own library e-book bill, which now heads back to the state Senate... 

 

Libraries losing e-books matters because they serve us as citizens. It’s easy to take for granted, but libraries are among America’s great equalizers."

Public libraries across the country face a different type of censorship; Tennessean, September 20, 2019

Kent Oliver, Tennessean; Public libraries across the country face a different type of censorship

"Book censorship impedes access to literature and information. For a public library such as Nashville Public Library, unfettered, undiscriminating access to reading is the core of our work – it is in our library DNA. Access is the key word. Librarians work to ensure access to ideas, popular and unpopular, within financial constraints.

The disturbing issue confronting us for this year’s Banned Books Week, Sep. 22-28, is the restrictions publishers are placing on public libraries making it more difficult to buy e-books and e-audiobooks. In particular, libraries are concerned about a new e-book embargo from Macmillan, one of the biggest book publishers in the industry, set to launch Nov. 1.

Under this new policy, libraries will be limited to purchasing (closer to leasing, really) one copy of a new e-book for eight weeks after release, when demand is at its peak."

 

Question Technology; Kip Currier, Ethics in a Tangled Web, December 31, 2018

Kip Currier; Question Technology

Ars Technica’s Timothy B. Lee’s 12/30/18 “The hype around driverless cars came crashing down in 2018” is a highly recommended overview of the annus horribilis the year that’s ending constituted for the self-driving vehicles industry. Lee references the Gartner consulting group’s "hype cycle" for new innovations and technology:

In the self-driving world, there's been a lot of discussion recently about the hype cycle, a model for new technologies that was developed by the Gartner consulting firm. In this model, new technologies reach a "peak of inflated expectations" (think the Internet circa 1999) before falling into a "trough of disillusionment." It's only after these initial overreactions—first too optimistic, then too pessimistic—that public perceptions start to line up with reality. 

We’ve seen the hype cycle replayed over and over again throughout the World Wide Web age (and throughout recorded history), albeit with new players and new innovations. Sometimes the hype delivers. Sometimes it comes with an unexpected price tag and consequences. Social media was hyped by many through branding and slogans. It offers benefits; chief among them, expanded opportunities for communication and connection. But it also has significant weaknesses that can and have been exploited by actors foreign and domestic.

Since 2016, as example, we’ve acutely learned—and are still learning—how social media, such as Facebook, can be used to weaponize information, misinform citizenry, and subvert democracy. From Facebook’s “inflated expectations” Version 1.0 through multiple iterations of hype and rehype, to its 2018 “trough of disillusionment”--which may or may not represent its nadir--much of the public’s perceptions of Facebook appear to finally be aligning with a more realistic picture of the company’s technology, as well as its less than transparent and accountable leadership. Indeed, consider how many times this year, and in the preceding decade and a half, Planet Earth’s social media-using citizens have heard Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg essentially say some version of “Trust me. Trust Facebook. We’re going to fix this.” (See CNBC’s 12/19/18 well-documented “Mark Zuckerberg has been talking and apologizing about privacy since 2003 — here’s a reminder of what he’s said”) Only for the public, like Charlie Brown, to have the proverbial football once again yanked away with seemingly never-ending revelations of deliberate omissions by Facebook leadership concerning users’ data collection and use.

To better grasp the impacts and lessons we can learn from recognition of the hype cycle, it’s useful to remind ourselves of some other near-recent examples of highly-hyped technologies:

In the past decade, many talked about "the death of the print book"—supplanted by the ebook—and the extinction of independent (i.e. non-Amazon) booksellers. Now, print books are thriving again and independent bookstores are making a gradual comeback in some communities. See the 11/3/18 Observer article "Are E-Books Finally Over? The Publishing Industry Unexpectedly Tilts Back to Print" and Vox’s 12/18/18 piece, “Instagram is helping save the indie bookstore”.

More recently, Mass Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were touted as the game-changer that would have higher education quaking in its ivory tower-climbing boots. See Thomas L. Friedman's 2013 New York Times Opinion piece "Revolution Hits the Universities"; five years later, in 2018, a MOOCs-driven revolution seems less inevitable, or perhaps even less desirable, than postulated when MOOCs had become all the rage in some quarters. Even a few months before Friedman’s article, his New York Times employer had declared 2012 as “The Year of the MOOC”. In pertinent part from that article:

“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. [Note to the author: you might just want to qualify and/or substantiate that hyperbolic assertion a bit about “everyone”!] Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

Nick McKeown is teaching one of them, on computer networking, with Philip Levis (the one with a shock of magenta hair in the introductory video). Dr. McKeown sums up the energy of this grand experiment when he gushes, “We’re both very excited.” 

But read on, to the very next two sentences in the piece:

Casually draped over auditorium seats, the professors also acknowledge that they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.

“We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.

Yes, you read that right: 

“…they are not exactly sure how this MOOC stuff works.” And ““We are just going to see how this goes over the next few weeks,” says Dr. McKeown.”

Now, in 2018, who is even talking about MOOCs? Certainly, MOOCs are neither totally dead nor completely out of the education picture. But the fever pitch exhortations around the 1^st Coming of the MOOC have ebbed, as hype machines—and change consultants—have inevitably moved on to “the next bright shiny object”.

Technology has many good points, as well as bad points, and, shall we say, aspects that cause legitimate concern. It’s here to stay. I get that. Appreciating the many positive aspects of technology in our lives does not mean that we can’t and shouldn’t still ask questions about the adoption and use of technology. As a mentor of mine often points out, society frequently pushes people to make binary choices, to select either X or Y, when we may, rather, select X and Y. The phrase Question Authority was popularized in the boundary-changing 1960’s. Its pedigree is murky and may actually trace back to ancient Greek society. That’s a topic for another piece by someone else. But the phrase, modified to Question Technology, can serve as an inspirational springboard for today. 

Happily, 2018 also saw more and more calls for AI ethics, data ethics, ethics courses in computer science and other educational programs, and more permutations of ethics in technology. (And that’s not even getting at all the calls for ethics in government!) Arguably, 2018 was the year that ethics was writ large.

In sum, we need to remind ourselves to be wary of anyone or any entity touting that they know with absolute certainty what a new technology will or will not do today, a year from now, or 10+ years in the fast-moving future, particularly absent the provision of hard evidence to support such claims. Just because someone says it’s so doesn’t make it so. Or, that it should be so.

In this era of digitally-dispersed disinformation, misinformation, and “alternate facts”, we all need to remind ourselves to think critically, question pronouncements and projections, and verify the truthfulness of assertions with evidence-based analysis and bonafide facts.