KAISER FAMILY FOUNDATION AND THE BOOK INDUSTRY STUDY GROUP

I was just reading an interesting article in Library Journal titled, The Price of E-Book Access, and thought I might share the highlights with you guys, seeing as you are avid readers, bloggers, and writers yourself. The article itself is by Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief of Library Journal.

The studies targeted "eight- to 18-year-olds" and their amounts of consumption of various media, "She writes that The two studies...lend support to the idea of mashing-up formats and devices." In other words, just as in everything else, the consumer wants options. And option they shall get, because the ebook publishers want to sell as many as the print publishers.

"According to the Kaiser study on recreational media use, kids spend about 7½ hours each day consuming media—(in descending order) TV, music/audio, computer use, video games, print (reading), movies—with multitasking bringing that up to 10¾ hours". An interesting side not was, "Reading print books has remained relatively steady, from 43 minutes a day in 2004 to 38 in 2009." And, even some data that was not all that surprising at all, "Twenty percent of media consumption occurs on mobile devices."

"A BISG study of purchasers of both print and ebooks (only 868 out of 36,000 people “qualified” as respondents) cited affordability as the primary reason to purchase an ebook over a print book. Some one-fifth say they stopped buying print books, and, surprise, surprise, most wanted portability among devices."

Where does all this leave libraries, librarians, and those in librarianship? Well, the article also talks about libraries giving patrons the option of buying a title instead of waiting for the title to come in once they place it on hold. But this brings up issues of class and status because are our libraries, one of the symbols of our democracy, going to prefer the wealthy. You have to admit this does present an interesting problem.

Now let me compound the problem, libraries could stand to make money on the transfer fee that they could charge you to get you that book. Which begs the question, why not just buy it on Amazon, etc. I got to tell you, I don't necessarily think this is a bad idea, especially seeing as libraries are always getting their funding ripped out of their chests.

I would love to hear you thoughts.