Ranganathan and the 5 Blind Librarians

It's "Choose Privacy Week". To celebrate, the American Library Association is publishing a series of blog posts; today they're running mine! I wanted to write something special, so I decided to have little fun with a parable. I'm reprinting it here:

I've heard it told that after formulating his famous "Five Laws of Library Science", the great Indian librarian S. R Ranganathan began thinking about privacy in libraries. Here's what I remember of the tale:

In India at the time, there were five librarians reknowned far and wide for their tremendous organizational skills, formidable bibliographic canny, and the coincidental fact that each of them was blind. It was said that "S" could identify books by their smell. "H" could classify a book just by the sound of the footfalls of a person carrying it. "T" was famous for leading patrons by the hand to exactly the book they wanted; the feel of a person's fingernails told him all he needed to know. "P" knew everything there was to know about paper and ink. "C" was quick with her fingers on a keyboard and there was hardly a soul in his city she had not corresponded with.  But these 5 were also sought out for their discretion; powerful leaders would consult them, thinking that their blindness made them immune to passing on their secrets of affairs and of state.

So of course, Ranganathan asked the five blind librarians to come to him so he could benefit from their wisdom and experience with privacy. The great librarians began talking among themselves as they sat outside Ranganathan's house.

"On my way through the countryside I encountered a strange beast", said librarian H.  "I can't say what he was, but he had a distinctive call like a horn: Toot-to-to-toooot..." and librarian H reproduced a complicated sound that must have had at least 64 toots.

"By that sound, I think I encountered the same beast." said librarian T. "I reached out to touch him. He was hard and smooth, and ended in a point, like a great long sword."

"No, you are wrong", said librarian P. I heard the same sound, and the strange beast is like a thick parchment, I could feel the wind when it fluttered.

"You fellows are so mistaken." said librarian C "You touch for a second and you think you know everything. I spent 15 minutes playing with the beast, she is like a great squirming snake."

"I know nothing of the beast except the smell of his droppings," said librarian S.  "But what I do know is that the beast had recently eaten a huge feast of bananas."

At this, a poacher who had been eavesdropping on the five librarians picked up his shotgun and ran off.

Just then, Ranganathan emerged through his door. Surprised at seeing the poacher run off, he asked the librarians what they had been talking about.

The librarians each repeated what they had told the others. When librarian S finally recounted the banana smell, Ranganathan became alarmed. The poacher had run in the direction of a grove of banana trees. Before he could do anything, they heard the sound of a powerful shotgun in the distance, and then the final roar of a dying elephant. 

With tears in his eyes, Ranganathan thanked the 5 librarians for their trouble, and sent them home. Though Ranganathan's manuscript on privacy has been lost to time, it is said that Ranganathan's 1st law of library privacy went something like this:

"Library Spies Don't Need Eyes".

Christmas and Cooking

In Lalbagh Garden, in Bangalore, I found this plaque establishing the link between Christmas (tree) and the Cook (pine):

"Christian community treat this tree as sacred one & worship during Christmas."

Note the Muslim women having a photo snapped, with "Christmas Trees" in the background.

In my house, many holiday rituals surround cooking. One of my most precious possessions is this copy of Stora Kokboken, which I haul out every December to help with my liver pâté, my award-winning Swedish coffeebread and whatever else sparks happy memories. I say hello to my mom's notations and feel her presence.

(Stora Kokboken, Edith Ekegårdh and Britta Hallman-Haggren, Wezäta Förlag, Göteborg, 1957)

Opposite the title page is this:

My parents were married in December of 1957; the cookbook was a Christmas present from my mom's father, stepmother and stepsister. The note says "En god jul önskar vi er!" which translates as "We wish you a Merry Christmas".

What they said.

Crossing the Street in India

It sounds funny to say, but the thing I'll remember longest about my two weeks in India is learning to cross the street. When I first arrived, I didn't dare. Not only do they drive on the wrong side of the street, but they also drive on the right side of the street, the middle of the street, and on various surfaces that would not be considered streets here in New Jersey.

The protocol for pedestrians and motorists to coexist was not apparent to me. Pedestrians seemed to cross the street with minimal regard for traffic; the cars unaccountably seemed to miss them at high speed. After a few days of watching this dance, I screwed up my courage and crossed in the wake of some elderly women in saris. By the weekend, I was crossing on my own; the key seemed to be steadiness- a sudden move could fool a three wheeled "auto" or motorcycle carrying a family of six into your path. Motorized vehicles in India always have to be on the lookout for the vegetable cart, cow, goat, dog or camel that might need to share the roadway.

I learned a lot about other things, too. Last Wednesday, I gave a lecture for the Bangalore chapter of the Society for Information Science. My talk was titled "Why Libraries Exist: Transitioning from Print to eBooks." I've been working on this talk for a while (based partly on this post); but this was the first time I've given it publicly; I'll be giving versions of the talk twice in February.

There were lots of questions and much discussion. There are so many differences between conditions in the US and in India regarding ebooks. Not only are adoption rates very different, but there are potential ebook applications in India that had never occurred to me.

For example, while e-reader adoption is negligible in India, it may well be that textbook distribution via e-readers may happen sooner in India than in the west. In India, textbooks are a government-run enterprise. Government agencies produce, print and distribute textbooks throughout the country; owing to the country's huge population, the number of textbooks printed is quite large. Getting the right textbooks to remote locations can be a real logistics challenge. If e-readers could be made cheaply enough, there would be many advantages and potential cost-savings in their use for textbook distribution. Compared to laptops and desktop computers, e-readers pose smaller demands on electrical infrastructure; the demand for mobile phones even in rural areas has already spurred the introduction of portable chargers (hand-powered and solar-powered).

Public libraries in India are under-utilized compared to their counterparts in the west. One of the people attending my talk was Dr. M. S. Sridhar; he asked some very penetrating questions about the effects of ebooks on readership. He asked the audience to raise their hands if they were a member of a public library. Only a few hands went up. He later sent me a copy of a column he had written for the Deccan Herald (61 (24) 24 January 2008, DH Education, p II.)

During last four decades, the percentage of American population having public library cards has increased almost three fold from about 25 to 72. On the contrary, in a progressive state like Karnataka, after 40 years of enacting a comprehensive Public Libraries Act and establishing 5000 libraries, we have not been able to reach more than 2% of the population. A poor market penetration of public libraries over half a century of National Library Movement!

If my thesis about the economic forces behind "why libraries exist" is really true, then book sharing mechanisms ought to arise in any free-market society. If so, then why is there so little utilization of public libraries in India? Is it the lack of a "reading habit"? Given  the stories I heard about even poor domestic workers making great sacrifices to send their children to expensive schools that teach English; I have my doubts about this. Perhaps it's due to a widespread availability of inexpensive books; I didn't see that in the bookstores I visited. My guess is that informal book sharing  mediated by family, clan, school and work relationships are filling the economic niche left by public libraries that fail to connect with their communities.

Having survived numerous street crossings and a 26-hour ocean and continent-crossing journey to get back home, I have a better appreciation of the many ways that societies will negotiate the print-to-digital book chasm.

The Most Important e-Reader Company You've Never Heard Of

Imagine you're the head of a big print media company. Sales of your print products have been eroding steadily and you find yourself competing with internet businesses that have very different business models and cost structures. Your own website revenues have been growing steadily, but it will be many years before they match your print subscription revenue. You know in your heart that digital subscriptions will somehow be the answer, but your otherwise loyal reader base is resisting web subscription rates that would allow you to sustain your business.

What do you do?

One answer is something I've speculated about, based on cost reduction trends for tablets and ebook readers. Bundle a reader device into your subscriptions! The consumer gets a device for "free", and you've retained a premium subscriber. You could even bundle a shopping application and collect a commission on purchases of content made through your estore.

At first glance, the obstacles to a successful implementation of the bundled e-reader strategy might seem profound. Here's an incomplete list of what you'd have to do:

1. You'd need an inexpensive device, of course. But it can't be something cheesy, because it will be carrying your brand.
2. You'd need an operating system for your device. Lucky for you, Google seems to have a good solution with Android. But you still need people who can customize and adapt Android to make it shine.
3. You'd need to figure out the logistics of getting your content onto the device. Maybe you've already started this process with Apps for iPad or Android.
4. If you're serious about an estore, someone has to build that, too. It's not only an engineering project it's also a big business development task to gather businesses willing to sell their content and goods through your estore.
5. You'll need to build a customer support operation.
6. You'll need some big marketing power and a sales channel.

Most big media companies have only the last item in their portfolio of competencies, so you might expect this isn't going to happen anytime soon.

But you'd be wrong.

On Thursday, my rounds in Bangalore took me to Ninestars Information Technologies Ltd. Ninestars specializes in back-end infrastructure for publishing companies. They started out doing newspaper backfile digitization, and today they work with a Who's Who of the newspaper and publishing world. It's Ninestars, an Indian company,  that's actually doing much of the heavy lifting in the preservation of the entire world's history. Early on, Gopal Krishnan, the company's Chairman, made a crucial decision to steer away from the brute-force, labor intensive approach to digitization in favor of developing technology and automation so that jobs could be done faster and with fewer people. That decision has paid off as publishing has become more and more dependent on advanced technology, whether it's website and e-commerce development, content delivery, or mobile and tablet apps.

Ninestars operates under a "white-label" business model. If you go to their website, you'll be surprised at its small size and inertness. But don't judge a book by its cover- Ninestars and Gopal are major players. Playing the white-label role to the hilt, Ninestars wants the spotlight to shine on their customers, as if Ninestars didn't even exist.

Ninestars' e-reader strategy is similarly white-label. Tablets and e-readers are being developed by Ninestars' associated company DisplayTronics Reader Devices Ltd.. DisplayTronics CEO Dr. Somanath V S gave me a peek inside the DisplayTronics development laboratory. I saw a range of e-reader prototypes- both EPD and color LCD, all with touchscreens. These will be sold under brands that are already familiar to consumers.

DisplayTronics is also building a white-label "estore" that its customers will use to sell their content, whether on their branded e-readers, or through apps on other device platforms.

While I've written a fair amount here about business models for ebooks, I haven't really covered business models for e-readers. Everyone knows about Apple's hardware-oriented business model and Amazon's commerce oriented business model, but there's not been much in the way of business models that put content at the center -yet. With e-reader pricing dropping at a relentless pace, big media companies are potentially in an excellent position to remake the e-reader market in a ways that sustain their businesses. Companies that try to make money by selling devices might find it difficult to compete against free or subsidized devices bundled into media subscriptions.

We'll find out how well the bundled-e-reader business models work when they launch - in 2011.

Inside an Indian Bookstore

I'm in Bangalore, the tech capital of India, where even the Cook pines look like cell phone towers.

My favorite "tourist" activity in a country new to me is to go inside ordinary stores. A walk through grocery store will give you a much better understanding of a nation's cuisine than their best restaurants. You'll see strange foods and smell strange smells, and you'll see familiar foods presented in unexpected ways.

So I just had to visit a bookstore here. I chose a medium sized one, situated on the second and third floors of a building in a busy shopping district. Like bookstores anywhere else, Indian bookstores find it profitable to stack lots of non-book items- in this store, the entire second floor is taken up with DVDs, toys, games, teddy bears and Ganesha figures.

In this bookstore, six of seven aisles are devoted to English-language books. The seventh aisle is devoted to books in the local language, Kannada. Kannada is spoken by a total of 60 million people in southern India, which is a lot more than than speak many European languages, but in India it's a minority.

As you might expect from Bangalore's status as a tech capital, an entire aisle of the bookstore is given over to computer-related books. The prices of these books were higher than I thought they would be. For example, the latest edition of Programming Perl was 750 Rupees, or about 17 US dollars. In the US, it's 33 dollars at Amazon. (Wow, that's pretty expensive!) Books aimed at the Indian market are priced lower- 150-300 Rupees.

You might wonder how programming books can command such prices given that many good ones are available in free html versions in a region with a per capita income only 1/40th of the US; even a software developer's salary is a fifth that of his US counterpart. Part of the reason may be that it's still unusual for people to have access to the internet at home. Print works better here.

By all reports, the ebook reader market in India is be poised for an explosion. If you think about it, a cheap ebook reader would be a really good way for Indians to take that free-on-the-web ebook home from the office. The bookstore I visited had a single ebook reader for sale- it's displayed in the book section on top of other luxury items such as the plastic-sealed copy of Dan Brown's Lost Symbol.

Infibeam's "Pi" ebook reader sells for 10,000 Rupees, or about $225. It's made in Taiwan and looks like a stripped-down Kindle, with e-ink display, but no keypad and no wireless connectivity. It supports all sorts of ebook formats, and most of the 22 official languages in India. The marketing slogan for the Pi is "Read eBooks Anywhere!" and the availability of free ebooks, including the "top 100 from Project Gutenberg", is prominently noted. The Infibeam website (which exhibits sincere flattery of Amazon) offers a wide selection of eBooks. Stieg Larsson has a good share of the Pi at 433 Rupees (close to the $9.99 Kindle pricing); he was nowhere to be found in the Bangalore bookstore.

While the Pi is first ebook reader targeted at the Indian market (Kindle is also available) there are a number of competitors waiting in the wings- I'll cover them in another article.

Where English is Spoken

According to Wikipedia, the countries with the most English speakers are

1. United States, 251 million English speakers
   
2. India, 232 million English speakers
   
3. Nigeria, 79 million English speakers
   
4. United Kingdom, 60 million English speakers
   
5. Philippines, 50 million English speakers

The US and UK, of course, are wealthy countries with strong publishing industries, but it would be a big mistake for English language publishers to ignore the possibilities for growth in the other three. India in particular already supports a billion dollar publishing industry.

The coming transition from print to digital books will cause significant upheaval for distribution of books from the US and UK in countries like India. This is because India and other developing countries are "price-sensitive". The idea of selling a popular western novel for $30 or so is seen as outrageous price-gouging from the Indian point of view. The book industry has historically worked around this issue by carving up rights to books into regional pieces. An Indian publisher can thus bring out an inexpensively manufactured edition of the book and sell it at a 20% of the price it fetches in its home market. The regionality of the selling rights protects products being sold in the developed market from competition with products priced for sale in developing countries.

With digital products, this practice becomes complicated. The DVD industry for example, uses region coding to prevent DVDs sold in one region of the world from being played on players sold in another region of the world. They have managed to do this by building a type of DRM into almost every DVD player sold.

This promises to be much harder to do for digital books; that's not to say that the book publishing industry isn't trying to do it. [Insert here your favorite argument against applying DRM to books]

Nonetheless, certain aspects of ebooks seem ideal for developing countries with large populations. The cost of creating an additional copy of an ebook is almost zero; and the cost of reader devices, which has finally cracked the $100 barrier in the US, continues to fall. It's not far fetched to think of generating significant revenue by selling millions of copies of popular ebooks for 10-25¢ a copy. Libraries could play an important role in helping to enable this sort of distribution securely.

One possible stumbling block to realization of this fantasy is ebook piracy. While no reproducible research has been able to show that ebook piracy is a significant issue in the US and UK markets, all the available data indicate that demand for pirated material is quite strong in developing markets. Publishers that ignore these markets because of their small economic value today are throwing away huge potential future markets by training consumers that if they want to obtain ebooks they need to avoid legitimate markets.

Bounty markets for ebooks could play an important role in monetizing large numbers of people who can only pay small amounts for ebooks. Because bounties are posted for open access release of ebooks, it doesn't work unless all global rights holders agree and get a share of the money. A credible market of this type would thus have to start out with a truly global presence. That's one reason I've just arrived in snowy London for a short visit and also a reason I'll be heading to balmy India this weekend.

Wish me luck.