ResourceBlog Article: NYPL's Paul LeClerc and Nine Other Luminaries Look Ahead to the Business of Reading

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Thursday, 11th February 2010

NYPL's Paul LeClerc and Nine Other Luminaries Look Ahead to the Business of Reading

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Commentary from:

1. Kurt Anderson

2. Katharine Weymouth

3. Jimmy Wales

Already there's a large movement of consumers generating all kinds of information online, and in many cases the quality is much higher than the content produced by media companies. This doesn't mean people don't trust newspapers, but they've lost their exclusivity as an authoritative voice.

4. Steven Brill

5. Marc Andreessen

Businesses built on the written word, like publishers, have to reinvent their whole businesses from top to bottom if they want to survive, because the economics of the Internet and the online world are different than in print. I think that's becoming increasingly obvious to people, but I worry that there's this temptation to hold on to the old model, and I fear that tablets are feeding that temptation.

6. Jeff Jarvis

7. Jeannette Walls

8. Paul LeClerc, president and CEO, New York Public Library

It's important to note that libraries have never been afraid of technology. There is lots of evidence that libraries have embraced new technologies as soon as they come along.

[Snip]

We've got one arm around all the traditional kinds of forms of human expression -- stuff on paper. But the other arm is wrapped around digital information, e-books as well as subscriptions to an extraordinary number of databases so we can provide our readers with access to information they need, regardless of the format. Our position is to be nimble, to move quickly, to exploit technology, to give our readers what they want when they want it.

One of the most popular parts of our collection now are e-books. We do two things. Let's say we want to buy copies of Catcher in the Rye, because the ones we have on the shelves are sort of beat up.

So we could buy x number of copies of Catcher in the Rye as books but also through a vendor we could buy y number of copies of Catcher in the Rye as e-books or e-audio books and then let's say we buy 50 of each, 50 hardcopy and 50 e-books. It's like having 100 copies of the book.

People can go to a library in their neighborhood, check out the physical copy, or a person could go online any time on his handheld device or computer. The digital version of the book would reside on the devices for three weeks and then disappear -- no overdue fines to pay!

9. Kevin Rose

10. Matt Mullenweg

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Source: Fortune

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