Well--its time again for the major holiday that immediately follows New Years Day:  The first day of the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.  This year Steve Ballmer has center stage showing a new slate computer from Microsoft that appears to be making it to market just ahead of a similar slate computer that we all know is coming from Apple.  Note what Ballmer says about the new device--among other things:  "Its perfect for Reading..."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoft/2010725499_ces07.html?pr...

So what does this have to do with open-source library systems?  Plenty.  Read on--

Our main business--books--are getting easier and easier to read in online formats.  We think our business is safe because the Kindle costs alot and you have to buy the book from Amazon--but this Microsoft announcement shows that the convenient book size device is emerging as a generic tool in the reading culture, and just like with Music, we can be sure that tons of inexpensive to free titles will be more and more available for convenient downloading by readers.

If your library is like ours, then you know that one of the time-honored metrics for the success of a library are circulation statistics.  They've been going up like a bull market in recent years--5 to 7 percent per year here at KCLS for as long as I can remember.  They are still going up recently, perhaps even further buoyed by the traditional inverse relationship between library circulation and the economy.

So what's the problem?  Well, nothing as long as those circ numbers hold, but we should learn from the music industry and the stock market--when the fall comes, its going to come hard and fast.  Make it easy enough, and fun enough, and compelling enough, and the general populace will turn to their slate computer as their general reading medium of choice.

When that day comes, our process for providing free ebooks and audiobooks from the library had better be easy...underscore EASY!!!  We may think our Overdrive catalogs are easy to access now, and credits to Overdrive for fantastic pioneering work in the world of publishing license negotations--but getting to the books is not easy enough.  Try it--you'll see.

With vended ILS systems, we always had a ready excuse that we couldn't make access to e-books any easier because we were limited by the available functionality of our online catalog.  With open-source, that's not true any more.  We have no excuse.  Our open-source development projects should include apps.  Lots of apps. 

The Apple store has over 100,000 apps.  The Google droid system is lagging for now, but coming on strong with 18,000 apps.  (I'm a droid fan because--of course--there is an open-source bias there).

How will we know when our ebook access is easy enough to really compete?  Here's how:

When I'm driving and the GPS is engaged on my droid-phone, I want to be able to easily switch screens without crashing the car and see 5 recommended Overdrive audiobook titles that I can touch and begin streaming to my car speaker system.

When I'm at Starbucks and finishing the extraordinary autobiography of Andre Agassi, and I realize I've just got to have another good autobiography, I want to be able to see a list of recommended autobiographies on my droid-phone, or my new Microsoft Slate computer--and use the GPS capabilities of the device to show me the closest King County library that has a copy on the shelf right now.

Or better yet--I want the text of that new autobiography to appear right then and there on my new Microsoft Slate Computer that Steve Ballmer is praising so highly at CES this weekend.  I want us to have all the publishing rights and DRM and what have you all worked out, and I want the interface to be EASY...I repeat EASY.

With open source, we finally have the power to collaborate and take development of these ideas into our own hands.  And given this announcement from Microsoft, it strikes me that we might be best off to do it sooner than later.

PS:  I'm halfway through reading my first full-book on my droid-phone.  "Strange Things Happen" by Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police.  Great book.  And the reading experience is not as bad as you may think.  If they could only make the screen a wee bit bigger...oh wait...they just did.