I spent most days between 1990 and 2005 thinking about the future of libraries. My career then focused on the planning, development, and management of digital libraries. A major topic for librarians throughout the 1990s was understanding the future role of libraries, partly by attempting to understanding what business were libraries really in. Much of the current discussion regarding e-books and publishing parallels these same concerns for libraries.

Indeed, many may think that libraries are in even more perilous condition than publishing and booksellers. But, at least at the academic library level with which I am most familiar, that is far from true. Academic librarianship – which has the clear purpose of serving the research and educational mission of its parent college or university – benefited from strong professional leadership that shared a common concern for shaping a strategic response to the emerging digital landscape.

Why are academic libraries not endangered? While not everyone is onboard, it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of the leadership in academic libraries share a common understanding:
* Libraries are not buildings.
* Libraries are not warehouses of books.
* Libraries provide a service to the academic community, which includes the provision of books (print as well as digital resources) but also includes other services (e.g., training in information literacy and digital media).
* Libraries have long known that no library can afford a book collection that meets the needs of everyone, which led to resource sharing agreements such as interlibrary loan and cooperative collection development among institutions.

Libraries realized that they serve the information needs of students and faculty regardless of media. An essential part of that service is “library as place”, providing a space for students to study, work collaboratively, and – yes – even socialize.

I could go on and on about strategic issues for academic libraries, but that’s not the purpose here.

Publishers – unlike academic librarians – don’t share a common vision or even goal. The variety of publishers mean that there’s no solution that fits the entire industry. Some publishers will determine that they are, indeed, in the information industry. Other publishers rightly will decide that they are, indeed, in the book business. Yes, the publishing of print books will survive throughout our lifetimes, but – of course – it’s will be very different for certain classes of publishers.

Even when I was a librarian I didn’t mind people writing in books. (Okay, not with big yellow highlighters but pencil or even ink doesn’t annoy me as long as the book is not a special edition.)

What I liked is seeing what others marked as particularly important. Perhaps that was a section I needed to pay more attention.

Annotating text is a good way of reading a book closely. (Of course, not all books deserve a close reading.) But those little gestures from readers past are helpful in browsing through an online edition, too, as seen in this snapshot from a title in Google Books (Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New by Walter Crane ).

At over 350 pages, having a filter of sorts helps to absorb the book quickly.

Collaborative tools for e-books have long been a desired feature by many of us in the digital library community, but there are a lot of underlying technical issues regarding interoperability. Then there’s also the issue of just exactly whose markings and annotations do readers want to see….surely, not everybody’s. Then again, for the many scholarly titles out there….we have to admit…that there’s not many readers for those books in the first place, so perhaps the anonymous marks of a stranger may help rather than hinder.

It’s fun to watch the birth of a brand new blog, and a promising new blog is Kristin Lawrence on scholarly publishing.

In a post titled on text taking precedence, she writes

Moving to a text-takes-precedence model, where design gives way to an XML style sheet and printing is offered only on demand and serves just to hold the book together, means we have to focus on content and use and search, not aesthetics.

This reminds me a lot of my days in academic libraries. But over the last few years I’ve come to a rather opposite conclusion. For 15 years I specialized in digital libraries, which primarily is focused on content and search retrieval.

After a move to South America I got involved with book design. For so long I tried to convince myself that the text-takes-precedence model had to work since, after all, that was the basis of everything I valued in developing digital libraries. But I always felt that something was missing and that was largely the aesthetics of digital content.

Most people involved in developing digital libraries and scholarly publishing are programmers, project managers, and administrators. Occasionally, someone in that crew will have learned a few things about Photoshop and labeled himself a graphic designer.

(And I will be the first to admit that I am no graphic designer but I do work with one).

If the future of publishing scholarly monographs is to store the content in XML and generate end-products in various formats via styles sheets, then it’s imperative that those involved in scholarly publishing connect with those who can bring quality design to those style sheets.

These days there are a ton of professional designers well versed in crafting great designs with style sheets. It can be done and it’s vital that individuals within the scholarly community don’t let programmers and administrators convince them that aesthetics does not matter.