Peter Brantley: “Digital Books and Flying Cars: Libraries as Collateral Damage”

Peter Brantley will discuss today’s changing publishing environment, and why actions of publishers are rational, even as they threaten to destroy traditional models of library book lending. Brantley will also offer a few conjectures about library responses to these changes:

In an incredibly short period of time, control of the publishing industry has largely moved out of the hands of publishers. This organizational disruption has many precedents but occurs at a time of tremendous technological change, with content production and distribution shifting rapidly from physical to digital modes, with concomitant economic upheaval. Even the very conception of the “book” as a self-contained package, with an emphasis on a linear narrative, has been flipped inside out as new interactive applications bridge media types: books that are not quite books, movies, or games; books that know where I am, and can learn from my reading of them.

Peter Brantley is the Director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based not-for-profit library, and is a co-founder of the Open Book Alliance, a coalition of librarians, legal scholars, authors, publishers, and technology companies. He was previously the Director of the Digital Library Federation, a non-profit association of research and national libraries.

For more information about this event, see the announcement from U-M Library.