Library to offer new reading options

In 1996, Robert Schrag came up with a novel idea.

For two years, Schrag, who is now a communication technologies professor, ran a children's publishing company that distributed books not in paper form, but on the computer. Consumers downloaded the book and read it on their screens.

"It was an idea 10 to 15 years ahead of its time," Schrag said with a laugh. "I only lost the cost of a Duke MBA doing it."

But more than a decade after Schrag's company failed to take off, companies like Sony and Amazon have unveiled a new version of the electronic book. This updated take on an older concept pairs mobility with new technology - electronic ink. And next week, students will get the chance to test drive two models by borrowing them from D.H. Hill's Learning Commons.

According to Greg Raschke, associate director of collections and scholarly communication at the library, the Learning Commons will have two Sony Readers and six Amazon Kindles ready to check out for a week at a time. Students looking to check out the e-book readers can visit the reference desk in the East Wing, where they can tell the reference librarians which books they want to download onto the device.

Books that have already been downloaded will stay on the device, where students can access them.

"Essentially, students can sort of build their own popular collection," Raschke said. "Students have been asking us for a while to build up our popular collection."

The library will also purchase subscriptions to the nation's major newspapers, available wirelessly with the Kindle. Although the devices will come with extra perks like these, Raschke said he figures they will mostly be used for leisure reading.

And Schrag said that's a trend that is likely to continue even among the broader audience for e-book readers like the Kindle or Reader. It will be a while, he said, before devices like the Kindle could be used in areas like the college classroom, which means students won't see a decrease in textbook costs from e-book readers.

That's because Schrag said most of the "obscenely expensive" cost of a college textbook comes not from the materials, but from the actual intellectual property inside. Whether it's on paper or e-paper, that intellectual property will be the same value.

"My guess is that if you're spending $400 for the Kindle, you're probably not going to spend $400 on paper and ink costs in the four years you're an undergraduate," Schrag said.

And there's another reason Schrag said college students, specifically, won't be an initial target in a textbook's business model.

"College students are a captive audience. They have to read what the University tells them to read," Schrag said. "[If I'm the publisher,] I'm not going to go nuts trying to give them a better choice. You guys have to pay what the publisher says you have to pay."

He mentioned the textbook for his own class, which switches editions every few years.

"The content doesn't change," Schrag said. "It's just a new way to rip off the students and make them pay that top-dollar price."

However, he said the leisure reading market has the ability to drive the price of the platform down, bringing it within reach of the educational market.

"It's going to be the Barnes & Noble mass audience," Schrag said. "They will be more prone to drive innovation in this technology."

The tipping point, Schrag said, will be if manufacturers can get a Kindle down below a $50 price tag.

That's why Raschke predicts e-book readers won't become relatively common, even among leisurely college-aged readers, until a few versions from now.

But one of the problems with adoption in areas like education, Schrag said, is the complexity of the technology itself. He said he reaches that conclusion simply by analyzing the current state of educational technology.

He taught the first Web authoring class at N.C. State in 1996. But just Sunday night, he said he was having trouble getting mp3 versions of lectures for his communication technology class online.

"We still haven't figured out how to get computers to deliver academic content smoothly," Schrag said. "You're not just putting Web pages on there. You're talking about different formats for information."

Even in the popular reading market, Raschke said e-books have been slow to catch on, mostly because of the limits of the display and the format. He said with a display that looks more like paper, that could change.

But no matter how popular e-books get, he said there's no danger of them making libraries themselves obsolete. He said embracing technologies is often the key to expanding library use.

"The biggest motivator is that students want us to be a technology incubator," Raschke said.

And expanded use is exactly what NCSU Libraries has seen, despite those who predicted that the Web would hurt is effectiveness. Last year, Raschke said patrons downloaded 2 million full text journals from the library.

But that success has come, he said, with a plateau in the growth of printed book circulation. He said all of the growth in the libraries has been digital, meaning relative decline in the growth of print.

Although he said the Kindle's "grandchildren" may inevitably be a standard in the hands of college students five to 10 years from now, D.H. Hill will continue to offer a range of media.

"For the foreseeable future, we're in a hybrid environment," Raschke said.