Tablet Popularity and Libraries

The explosion of tablet devices is proving to be a bit more disruptive than I had inititally anticipated. A new article has an interesting infographic that focuses in this case on the tablet's impact on journalism. An unsurprising result is that while use of online news sites on tablet devices is incredibly strong, users tend to stick to the big news sites and they aren't willing to spend money for online news services.

It'd be beneficical for librarians to start thinking about how this will apply to libraries, given the unavoidable shiift from desktop/laptop computing to mobile devices. As many as 79% of tablet users (who now are a staggering 11% of the population) used to use their desktop or laptop in getting news. And they are much more satisfied with the tablet experience. Libraries need to take heed of the trend and use it to their advantage. The good news is that libraries can play on the popularity of online journalism and eBooks while delivering a "value-added" experience on a tablet, especially as eBook lending practices and open access resources become more common.

Libraries' main problem, however, is that many of the materials online cannot be reached via Google. It is imperative that initiatives like OAI-MH start to move their systems closer to public visability. Imagine the satisfaction an iPad user could have looking through digital collections on their device that they couldn't have found via Google. Perhaps they were fed the collection through RSS. Maybe this could all be done through an app that houses basically the OAIster union catalog (see OAIster. The potential here is great.

Realistically, though, the hurdles loom large. It's simply hard to break out of the Google mindset these days. Even so, optimizing collections and services for use on tablets and mobile devices will be a major first step. Users of tablets, referencing the infographic, are not young, tend to be well-educated, and thus they might have a demand for the kind of information online collections/catalogs can offer. The key will be persuading them to come to it versus just Googling it and finding, on average, fairly low-quality results.

Abstraction is a Powerful Method

By "abstraction," I am referring to it in the Internets world. The beauty of abstraction on the Internet is that, when executed properly, people don't even know they're being shielded from complexity. The classic example is when you are shopping online for let's say shoes. You see on the sidebar you can select a link to filter shoes to show only those that cost under $50. What you don't know is you're actually executing a query to a database and pulling data from it. This abstraction means that millions of people who have no idea what in God's name a database is or does don't have to. And that is a very good thing.

But with great power comes great responsibility. A central tenet learned early on in design or working with some technology is to not obscure meaning in the design. Not only will you confuse the end-user, but they will not even be able to see what they did wrong, since the actual back-end is not accessible for them. And even if they could see the back-end, that would eliminate the entire point of abstracting the complexity from them. In other words, abstracting complexity is incredibly difficult to do, and has to be nigh perfect.

A good example of a great program falling victim to the difficulties of abstraction is Google Sites. I actually enjoy Google Sites, but when it first launched, it was kind of a nightmare. I know some basic XHTML, so I thought it'd be fun to play around with. Understandably, Google Sites made the decision to not allow HTML on the user-end being input. This makes sense as a first principle. But, it introduces some interesting problems. Google Sites, while it has improved over time, started out with an almost incomprehensible user interface. Knowing HTML was a disadvantage, because certain terms were borrowed from HTML design but were used to do completely different things. And while it was feasible, I doubt many people with zero knowledge of HTML were able to spit out a web page in a half hour. This narrows the target audience considerably. I still like Google Sites in the way I like Google Docs, and that is, it is extremely convenient to get something accomplished in a day or so. It's quick and dirty, but sometimes you don't have a choice due to time constraints. But I am almost certain this was not the initial intention of Google Sites; I'm pretty sure it was intended to be a stepping stone from almost zero HTML knowledge to being able to work with stuff like Wordpress.