A caminho das bibliotecas totalmente digitais: EUA

EUA tentam emplacar biblioteca 'sem livros'
Por Miguel Bustillo | The Wall Street Journal
Valor Econômico, 08.02.13

Usuários poderão usar seus próprios equipamentos ou tomar aparelhos emprestados na biblioteca pública que será aberta no condado de Bexar, no Texas

Um condado do Texas vai abrir nos próximos meses uma das primeiras bibliotecas públicas dos Estados Unidos completamente virtuais, um tipo de banco de informações onde as pessoas poderão acessar livros fazendo o download em seus próprios equipamentos ou pegando emprestado esses aparelhos eletrônicos.

O ambicioso projeto do condado de Bexar, que inclui a cidade de San Antonio, está sendo acompanho de perto por bibliotecários céticos. Alguns advertem que muitos títulos populares ainda não estão disponíveis em versões digitais para bibliotecas e são frequentemente mais caros que suas versões em papel. Outros dizem que experiências semelhantes acabaram com as pessoas pressionando para preservar os livros impressos.

Nelson Wolff, principal político do condado de Bexar, é um bibliófilo que tem cerca de mil primeiras edições de livros em sua coleção particular. Ele não possui um leitor eletrônico. Mas disse que concluiu - motivado em parte ao ler a biografia do cofundador da Apple Steve Jobs - que a tecnologia está mudando rápido demais para se fazer investimentos em conhecimento impresso.

Ele sugeriu que Bexar eliminasse a presença dos livros. O condado não conta com um sistema integrado de bibliotecas, mas decidiu abrir uma instalação digital para atender seus moradores em áreas com cobertura precária de bibliotecas. "Eu sou o tipo de pessoa que gosta de ter o livro nas mãos", disse Wolff. "Mas também admito que sou meio um dinossauro."

O lugar, que será aberto nos próximos meses perto da Prefeitura de San Antonio, terá cerca de 10 mil títulos e 150 leitores eletrônicos para os clientes consultarem, incluindo 50 para crianças. A biblioteca permitirá aos usuários acessarem os livros remotamente e contará com 25 laptops e 25 tablets para uso interno, assim como 50 computadores. Terá também sua própria cafeteria.

A equipe também vai ajudar os usuários com questões técnicas, mas não contará com assistentes de pesquisa. Autoridades do condado, que estimam um custo inicial de US$ 1,5 milhão para o projeto, acreditam que o custo total será mais baixo que o de montar uma biblioteca tradicional, e analisam abrir novas unidades.

O plano da biblioteca não gerou muitas críticas por parte da população, mas criou tensão entre as autoridades de San Antonio.

"Não estamos prontos para ir em direção às chamadas bibliotecas sem livros", diz Ramiro Salazar, diretor da biblioteca pública de San Antonio, que disse ter ficado surpreso ao ser informado dos planos do condado pela imprensa local. "Nossa experiência mostra que a demanda por livros impressos continua existindo e, na verdade, está crescendo."

Algumas faculdades começaram com as bibliotecas completamente digitais, incluindo a Universidade do Texas, em San Antonio, que foi uma das primeiras a tornar-se 100% digital em 2010 com a sua Biblioteca Aplicada de Engenharia e Tecnologia.

Mais de 75% das bibliotecas públicas dos EUA oferecem alguns livros digitais e 39% emprestam leitores eletrônicos a seus usuários, de acordo com a Associação Americana de Bibliotecas. Mas a ideia de migrar completamente para os livros digitais tem avançado lentamente, em parte porque editores temerosos de perder vendas com as versões impressas estão cautelosos em oferecer às bibliotecas novos títulos no formato digital e cobram mais delas por livros digitais que podem ser emprestados.

As bibliotecas do condado de Douglas, que atendem mais de 300 mil pessoas nos subúrbios de Denver, no Estado do Colorado, compilaram uma lista de títulos populares, seus preços e sua disponibilidade no formato digital para informar a colegas bibliotecários e ao público sobre as dificuldades para migrar para os livros digitais. Um relatório do mês passado mostrou que metade dos 20 livros que encabeçam a lista da Amazon.com não é oferecida pelas editoras às bibliotecas que emprestam os títulos a seus usuários.

Os livros disponíveis custam significativamente mais que as edições físicas: o líder de vendas "50 Tons de Cinza" custa US$ 47,85 em dois grandes fornecedores de livros digitais para bibliotecas, a 3M e a OverDrive, frente aos US$ 9,57 cobrados pelo mesmo livro impresso na distribuidora Baker & Taylor, segundo o condado.

"Um dos maiores desafios que a maioria das livrarias enfrenta hoje, especialmente com livros digitais, é que os orçamentos foram mantidos ou reduzidos e a maioria dos usuários não entende porque nós não podemos oferecer esses títulos", disse Maureen Sullivan, presidente da Associação Americana de Livrarias.

A 3M e a OverDrive reconhecem que preço e disponibilidade permanecem sendo questões para as bibliotecas, mas dizem que a situação melhorou notoriamente nos últimos dois anos.

Wolff, do Condado de Bexar, disse que o esforço no Texas enfrenta desafios, como o custo de substituir os leitores eletrônicos danificados. Mas ele diz acreditar que uma biblioteca que oferece apenas livros digitais precisará de menos espaço físico. "Nunca estivemos neste negócio antes", disse. "Mas acreditamos que esse é um jeito viável de trazer mais livros para as pessoas."

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Bibliotecas virtuais: uma desaparece, outra permanece (por enquanto)

No que se refere a VirtualBooks, trata-se de uma triste notícia o desaparecimento de uma das maiores, library.nu, mas por enquanto existe uma alternativa, que esperamos permaneça, e que leva à Library Genesis, neste link: http://free-books.us.to/

The disappearing virtuallibrary

Christopher Kelty *

Al-Jazeera, March1, 2012

* Christopher M. Kelty is an Associate Professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry. 

The shutdown of library.nu doesn't bode well for those who wish to learn, but can't afford to pay for textbooks

Los Angeles, CA - Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free.  And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. The texts ranged from so-called "orphan works" (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation. To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people - namely the users of the site - it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees?  They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet. Pirating to learn "The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn." The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do. Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases - we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook. So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates - the people who create and run such sites - think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before. But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu - these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university - are legion. They live all over the world, but especially in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in India. It's hard to get accurate numbers, but any perusal of the tweets mentioning library.nu or the comments on blog posts about it reveal that the main users of the site are the global middle class. They are not the truly poor, they are not slum-denizens or rural poor - but nonetheless they do not have much money. They are the real 99 per cent (as compared to the Euro-American 1 per cent). They may be scientists or scholars themselves: some work in schools, universities or corporations, others are doubly outside of the elite learned class - jobholders whose desire to learn is and will only ever be an avocation. They are a global market engaged in what we in the elite institutions of the world are otherwise telling them to do all the time: educate yourself; become scholars and thinkers; read and think for yourselves; bring civilisation, development and modernity to your people. Sharing is caring Library.nu was making that learning possible where publishers have not. It made a good show of being a "book review" site - it was called library.nu after all, and not "bookstore.nu". It was not cluttered with advertisements, nor did it "suggest" other books constantly. It gave straight answers to straightforward searches, and provided user reviews of the 400,000 or more books in the database. It was only the fact that library.nu included a link to another site ("sharehosting" sites like ifile.it, megaupload.com, or mediafire.com) containing the complete version of a digital text that brought library.nu into the realm of what passes for crime these days. But the legality of library.nu is also not the issue: trading in scanned, leaked or even properly purchased versions of digital books is thoroughly illegal. This is so much the case that it can't be long before reading a book - making an unauthorised copy in your brain - is also made illegal.  But library.nu shared books; it did not sell them. If it made any money, it was not from the texts themselves, but from advertising revenue. As with Napster in 1999, library.nu was facilitating discovery: the ability to search deeper and deeper into the musical or scholarly tastes fellow humans and to discover their connections that no recommendation algorithm will ever be able to make. In their effort to control this market, publishers alongside the movie and music industry have been effectively criminalising sharing, learning and creating - not stealing. Users of library.nu did not have to upload texts to the site in order to use it, but they were rewarded if they did. There were formal rules (and informal ones, to be sure), concerning how one might "level up" in the library.nu community. The site developed as websites do, adding features here and there, and obviously expanding its infrastructure as necessary. The administrators of the site maintained absolute control over who could participate and who could not - no doubt in order to protect the site from skulking FBI agents and enthusiastic newbies alike. Even a casual observer could have seen that the frequent changes to the site were the effects of the cat-and-mouse game underway as law authorities and publishers sought to understand and eventually seek legal action against this community. In the end, it was only by donating to the site that law authorities discovered the real people behind the site - pirates too have PayPal accounts. Shutting down learning The winter of 2012 has seen a series of assaults on file-sharing sites in the wake of the failed SOPA and PIPA legislation. Mega-upload.com (the brainchild of eccentric master pirate Kim Dotcom - he legally changed his name in 2005) was seized by the US Department of Justice; torrent site btjunkie.com voluntarily closed down for fear of litigation. In the last few days before they closed for good, library.nu winked in and out of existence, finally (and ironically), displayed a page saying "this domain has been revoked by .nu domain" (the island nation of Niue). It prominently displays a link to a book (on Amazon!) called Blue Latitudes, about the voyage of Captain Cook. A story about that other kind of pirate branches off here. So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? One thing it means is that these barbarians - these pirates who are also scholars - are angry. We scholars have long been singing the praises of education, learning, mutual aid and the virtues of getting a good degree. We scholars have been telling the world of desperate learners to do just what they are doing, if not in so many terms.  So there are a lot of angry young middle-class learners in the world this month. Some are existentially angry about the injustice of this system, some are pragmatically angry they must now spend $100 - if they even have that much - on a textbook instead of on themselves or their friends. All of them are angry that what looked to everyone like the new horizon of learning - and the promise of the vaunted new digital economy - has just disappeared behind the dark eclipse of a Munich judge's cease and desist order. Writers and scholars in Europe and the US are complicit in the shutdown. The publishing companies are protecting themselves and their profits, but they do so with the assent, if not the active support, of those who still depend on them. They are protecting us - we scholars - or so they say. These barbarians - these desperate learners - are stealing our property and should be made to pay for it. Profiteering In reality, however, the scholarly publishing industry has entered a phase like the one the pharmaceutical industry entered in the 1990s, when life-saving AIDS medicines were deliberately restricted to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits.  The comparison is perhaps inflammatory; after all, scholarly monographs are life-saving in only the most distant and abstract sense, but the situation is - legally speaking - nearly identical. Library.nu is not unlike those clever - and also illegal - local corporations in India and Africa who created generic versions of AIDS medicines. Why doesn't the publishing industry want these consumers? For one thing, the US and European book-buying libraries have been willing pay the prices necessary to keep the industry happy - and not just happy, in many cases obscenely profitable. Rather than provide our work at cheap enough prices that anyone in the world might purchase, they have taken the opposite route - making the prices higher and higher until only very rich institutions can afford them. Scholarly publishers have made the trade-off between offering a very low price to a very large market or a very high price to a very small market. But here is the rub: books and their scholars are the losers in this trade-off - especially cutting edge research from the best institutions in the world. The publishing industry we have today cannot - or will not - deliver our books to this enormous global market of people who desperately want to read them. Instead, they print a handful of copies - less than 100, often - and sell them to libraries for hundreds of dollars each. When they do offer digital versions, they are so wrapped up in restrictions and encumbrances and licencing terms as to make using them supremely frustrating.  To make matters worse, our university libraries can no longer afford to buy these books and journals; and our few bookstores are no longer willing to carry them. So the result is that most of our best scholarship is being shot into some publisher's black hole where it will never escape. That is, until library.nu and its successors make it available.  What these sites represent most clearly is a viable route towards education and learning for vast numbers of people around the world. The question it raises is: on which side of this battle do European and American scholars want to be? Christopher M Kelty is an Associate Professor of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Uma Biblioteca IMPRESSIONANTE... (et pour cause...)

Bem, não digo que é a melhor visão que se possa ter de uma biblioteca "apetitosa", mas, além de permitir carregar para todo lado, numa simples viagem de fim de semana, ela não daria mais trabalho para arrumar, acomodar, movimentar, em qualquer circunstância.
Pensando bem, fico com as duas: a tradicional e a moderna...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida