Maybe E-books Aren't the Future

If I had to pick one theme that sums up this blog so far, it's that as librarians (and those of us in training), we really need to overcome our fear of technology. The fear is understandable, but largely irrational. The fear sort of goes like this: technology makes everything digital and intuitive for the user, making the librarian obsolete. This is understandable, because in the modern age we have the classic assembly line analogy. A new machine is produced that can do your job 10 times faster at half the cost. The obvious result is that a lot of assembly line workers are losing their jobs.

There's several problems with this analogy in its application to librarianship, some of which I've hopefully outlined before. But I see this sort of mindset rearing its ugly head any time a new technology is discussed. Most recently, this discussion has centered around e-books.

Let me just come out and say that I'm not a huge fan of e-books, and a lot of people in my program share my reluctance. I don't think we're a particularly irregular representative of the population. Yes, e-books are selling incredibly well, and the growth will eventually be so large that we will all have one. It's well past the early adoption phase, but not yet in the "iPod" phase, where even your grandma has one but still might not know quite how to use it (sadly, this phase is permanent). For the record, I own a Zune. Yes, I know how shameful that is. You might even have to Wikipedia "Zune."

Despite my poor media player choices, I'm not stupid. Eventually resistance will be futile, and I'll have some 3rd generation e-reader that syncs with sports scores and spams me offers for car insurance when I'm trying to read about Teutoburg Forest. But is this the terminus? No! Then we will have some other future to worry about.

What I want people to do is to stop being myopic about the future. We tend to think that a future trend is finality. Who's to say that once e-books become ubiquitous, we won't come up with a way to project legible text via holography onto a good, old-fashioned, hardbound, ever reusable, pulp fiber, acid-free paper book? Or as someone else told me, a type of material that arranges itself to display the text intelligently based on whatever e-book information its given? Think about a library with a collection of empty books, just waiting for users to come in and display whatever they want onto the pages, that they'd otherwise need to pay out the nose for. The information is still the thing of value, and that will never change, whatever the medium or interface.

Once again, technology usually only makes the librarian's job more challenging, not obsolete. The problem is to rise to those challenges, and make your service more valuable, because now it's "worth" more. New shiny things cost lots of money, and there will always be a need for a library to be a "community early adopter," to help those who can't afford said shiny thing in order to really reap some rewards from their hard-earned taxes.

E-Books aren't the future, because the future doesn't exist. The future is always changing, and in fact never really happens. There is only the present. The rest is just stuff that may or may not happen. Why not work on the stuff you can change?