A Longer-Term View of Kindle Publishing

Just the other day, a patron asked me to purchase a copy of Leslie Marmon Silko's Oceanstory for our library. Oceanstory, it turns out, is a Kindle exclusive, which means that it is not available in print, at least not for now. While the library where I work regularly purchases e-books, we're unable to purchase Kindle-only titles because we have no way of hosting and sharing them.

Odyssey editions, which published Oceanstory, specializes in ebooks on the Kindle platform. The books listed on their website are all "classic" 20th-century works, available in print, so the Kindle-only policy isn't an issue in those cases. This blogpost by Chad Post explains Odyssey Editions' business model as exploiting loopholes in publishing contracts that specify the rights to publish an author's work in book form.

Oceanstory, however, seems to be working on a different model, where the book is available Kindle only without a print edition. It may be the case that the print is yet to come, but this case has made me wonder about the benefits of Kindle-only publishing from an author's point of view--not so much in terms of short-term revenue, but in terms of long-term reputation.

Here's what I mean: I understand the attraction of e-only publishing on a platform like the Kindle. Authors have access to publishing in entirely new ways and can by-pass the gatekeeping of publishing houses, many of which are primarily interested in finding the next big blockbuster. For authors who are willing to work their social media networks, they can find an audience on their own. This has obvious attractions.

Likewise, a Kindle-only book can't circulate in libraries, and some might see that as better for revenue. That, at least, is the case against "militant librarians who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to 'lend' our e-books without restriction" that Richard Russo makes in the widely circulated letter that he wrote encouraging authors to join the Authors Guild. That is, as long as the e-book in question is not part of an e-book package, like the Midwest  Collaborative for Library Services, through which public libraries loan kindles.

I'm not going to comment on whether or not restricting library circulation helps or hurts authors' revenues, but I do think that e-only books that are not available to libraries pose a risk to their authors in a way that doesn't get much press, and that's the threat to their future reputation. Simply, if authors' books aren't available for sale to libraries, that means that libraries cannot collect and archive them. And that's what large research libraries are interested in doing: only 20% of the books that we collect ever circulate, but we are also interested in preserving the cultural record for the future.

That might not seem important in the short term of building a reputation, an audience, and a writing career through robust Kindle sales. But I worry about whether those works will be available for scholars to study, write about, and teach in their classrooms--much less available to anyone who's interested in reading and talking about them in the future for whatever reason. By relying on Kindle, we essentially rely on Amazon to archive these materials. I'm not inclined to trust them.

Perma! Making (some of) the Internet forever

I heard a piece this morning on Marketplace Tech Report about Perma, which is a program started by a group of libraries in order to make online materials cited in scholarly journals permanent. The members of Perma are trying to solve a real problem: scholarly articles regularly cite links, and there's no guarantee that those links won't become obsolete. This problem, called link rot, is pervasive; according to Perma, 70% of the links in articles published in legal journals between 1999 and 2011 direct users to irrelevant content. Perma creates a permalink to an archived version of the original page.

Perma has some gatekeeping built in: once you register a link that you want to preserve, the scholarly journal that you are citing it in has to verify (or vest) the link to say that, yes, this is being cited in a scholarly source. The journals themselves have to be verified (or sponsored) by an institution. So, you can't just register every website that you think it would be great to have a copy of (NOT that I was tempted to do that. Certainly not).

Perma sounds like a great idea, but I have some questions...

1) If I'm understanding Perma's mission, a lot of the links that get perma'd are going to be to scholarly journal articles. If that's the case, how do we handle paywalls? I access journal articles through my library's subscription, and the link is generated through our proxy server. How do users from different institutions (or those who aren't affiliated with institutions) access subscription content archived through Perma?

2) Likewise, how does Perma overlap with other archiving programs like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)?

3) How will this impact open access journals that may not have institutional backing? Can they also be sponsoring journals so that the links in their articles are archived?

4) This only solves part of the problem for researchers using online sources. Wouldn't it be great if we could also solve the problem of archiving content that isn't necessarily cited in scholarly journal articles (or that future scholars might want to cite, but wouldn't have access to because it will have disappeared)? Too bad the NSA's new data farm in Utah can't be put to this use...