JEvents

The "Gist" of the Need for Small Scale Virtual Library Building

Draft 1 as of: 10.07.05

• Commercial book publishers are rapidly converting their word-processed paper-based books and textbooks into digital books also now called eBooks.  They plan to sell the digital eBook versions of a book or textbook for a fee perhaps only slightly less expensive than is the paper-based version of the book.  But unlike the paper-based book, the digital eBook can be "delivered" to the buyer's or student's computer in microseconds via the Internet. Reading the book, whether paper-based or digital, still takes the same amount of time and requires the use of computer with the digital eBook stored within it (or otherwise delivered to the reader through it).
• Very many of the textbooks published and sold by these commercial book publishers are used in schools and universities in developed and developing countries.  In the USA a single college textbook now costs more than $100 (US), often $150 or more. Very many developing countries simply cannot afford the price of a single copy of a textbook, nor can they afford books and textbooks on which their governments have placed expensive import tariffs!  Obviously the educators in those countries who want to use a more up-to-date textbook become more frustrated; the students remain poorly educated at best; the poorer countries remain lagging behind in the development of their own better educated "workers", teachers, scientists, planners, and managers.
• Almost all schools and universities in developed countries have had for several decades computers available on-campus for their students to use.  More and more schools and universities in developing countries are becoming able to setup at least one "computer lab" with 5 or 10 or more computers available for their students to use.
  
  • Does a student in the grades or classes lower than, say, the last years of college or in graduate school need to read a paper-based book anymore?  And if they do, for how much longer?
• There are some big problems with this emerging free market of digital eBook sellers and their for-profit business model, especially in a global economic recession.  Firstly it is a business controlled by the largest publishing firms and increasingly also by some giant Internet search engine corporations as well.  Consequently these various economic circumstances create some serious barriers to learning created by the "big commercial players" and their for-maximum-profit business models.  These problems are all the worse for public schools and universities in poor states or regions or countries with greater numbers of poor students who cannot now or anytime soon afford to buy their own paper-based books, let alone a digital eBook for a slightly lower price.
• Since digital eBooks can "get to" and be read by any student with a computer or even with a cell phone, these imposed commercial circumstances and limitations on access create artificial and this PI believes unnecessary and costly barriers between the most needy, least able to pay, students, and their digital learning materials, their digitally connected instructors and the learning experiences all these parties create to enhance each student's learning. To this PI that is a crime.
• The open questions seem to this PI to be these:
  
  • Can small, poor schools and school districts or the poorer universities with very small budgets afford to buy digital books from these publishers for their students to use ?
  • Can they afford not to buy them sooner or later as digital eBooks become more and more common place and as they become more in demand by their students?
  • Will their students begin to feel more and more under-priviledged and perhaps inferior as well if they do not have at least one digital eBook to use sometime during their years of education at a particular poor learning institution?
  • In poor developing countries will public schools and universities become more dependent or stay dependent on money from various NGOs, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to contribute the money with which the school or university can buy either paper-based OR digital eBooks from the for-profit commercial vendors of them (who are located in the developed countries) for their students to use? With the Internet available to deliver an eBook in microseconds to the buyer or student user, does this traditional paper-based book supply-demand model extended to encompass the sale and deliver of digital eBooks, seem ridiculous as well as punitive to students to anyone else besides this PI?
• Small, medium, and larger schools often have a library of a few books, or a library of a few tens of books, which their students can use in their studies for classes taught at the school. Perhaps the students have no books of their own to take home and read, but they might read from such books in the school's library when they are attending a class at the school or after classes.
  But these students who can read paper-based book are perfectly capable of reading a digital eBook at the school if the school has a working computer.  Or the student can read a digital eBook at home more or less anytime they like if the village or neighborhood has an Internet cafe or if the home or the student him or herself has a computer suitable for reading eBooks!  (See the One Computer Per Child (OLPC) project mentioned elsewhere on this web site.)
• One copy of a digital book stored on a web server can "serve" 100s or 1000s or millions of copies of that book's the text and graphics in that book to that many students geographically located anywhere in the world such that they are all reading the same digital eBook at the same time!
• More and more students in developed countries have computers, perhaps laptops, and certainly "cell phones".  In developing countries more and more would-be students have access to Internet cafes and perhaps also to a "cell phone".  More and more schools and universities in developing countries are getting computer labs with more and more computers in them, each computer connected to the Internet.  More and more of the "cell phones" are being traded in for "smart cell phones" which allow Internet browsing in addition to being able to make ordinary cell phone calls and perhaps also communicate long distances via "text messaging" from thumb-typing on a tiny keyboard located on the sender's phone.

Question: What can small, poor schools and school systems do while waiting for the "big commercial book publishers" to come to save them and rebuild their hard-copy paper-based libraries of books with their expensive digital eBooks?  Answer: the schools and universities can buy a new or used scanner, computer and get the software.  Then they can make their own, your own, small digital libraries, serve the digital library books privately just to their students when those students are on campus using the school's computer.  BUt also eventually they can inter-connect their small libraries of digital eBooks via the Internet so that all of their students -- the students in all of the schools and universities who have done this digitizing work -- so that any student can use any digital eBook at any time they want or need to read it.

The book digitizing process in brief:

• With a computer scanner, scan conversion software (a.k.a. optical character and graphics recognition (OCR) software), a table in a darkened room, and a computer that connects to the scanner, runs the scanning and OCR software, and which stores "1 gigabyte" or more of digital information in it (i.e. the scans a person makes of book pages), a staff member or employee of a school can scan some or all of the books of their school's library and turn them into digital eBooks for the PRIVATE use of their students!

 

"Gist" means brief, simple summary or overview of an otherwise more complex idea, concept or process.

Virtual Library Building means digitizing (scanning, converting scans to computer text and graphics) ordinary paper books, papers, records, etc.  The results are digital books, lately also called eBooks, and anyone with a computer with a display screen can read a digital eBook... whether the computer is a desktop, a laptop, a tablet computer, or a more tiny computer such as a smart phone.  The reading computer devices can store 10s or 100s or even 1000s of digital books, or eBooks, within the reading device (i.e. on computer memory cards or chips located inside the device).  But the "main library" or "central library", so to speak, of digital books, or eBooks, a digital book library which contains many thousands, tens or hundreds of thousands of digital eBooks, is typically located on a "web server" computer, or group of computers, of some kind which have enough additional storage capacity to hold tens or hundreds of thousands of digital eBooks.  (For technical people, the additional storage capacity on an eBook web server is several orders of magnitude larger than the storage on the personal computers and smart phones, i.e. 103 or 104 greater.)

Commercial book sellers who are converting to selling digital eBooks as well as to continue selling their ordinary paper-based products of hard-bound and soft-bound, i.e. paper-back, books and textbooks "only" need to setup a "web server" of the kind I described which is itself "enveloped" (digitally surrounded by) an "electronic commerce" or e-commerce web server system.  The e-commerce system lets them set a price for the an eBook and sell it to the end-user.  Once paid for, the end-user of the eBook "downloads" the digital eBook to their home or office computer, or to their laptop, netbook, notbook, iPad, iPhone, or to some more specialized "eReader" computer device or to a "Smart Phone" of some kind.  All display text and some still graphics (i.e. still pictures).   All can serve as reading devices on which the end-user and new purchaser of an eBook can read their book.

But libraries have existed for millenia.  They have real paper-based (and leather and papyrus and engraved stone and metal) books stored within them.  Ordinary people who's eyesight is working well, and who can read what has been written, have been able to visit libraries and read almost any of the books stored within them.  For several centuries in developed countries public libraries have made their paper-based book collections available to the general public merely for taking the trouble to get a "library card" and showing that card whenever they visit the library.  But here is the "kicker", the huge history change.

All of the world's paper-based (and metal and stone, etc. based) books can be digitized and stored on ONE and only only Internet connected computer.  Then anyone with another computer connected to the Internet can theoretically (i.e. in principle) read any of those digital books on their local computer!  And theoretically (i.e. in principle) anyone in the world could do so for free.

Why do these free digital libraries not yet exist online already in 2010?  Because many book publishers, book sellers, and other large corporations want to SELL to readers as many digital books including textbooks to those readers as possible.