Will vendor models change as libraries are forced to move away from traditional models? What about pay-per-view, POD, leasing? Libraries' budgets are being slashed. Scholarly sharing off the grid with social networking is gaining steam. Publishers and librarians have to understand which areas of social media will take precedence. Everyone is talking about patron-driven acquisition (PDA)... The 30th Annual Charleston Conference, Anything Goes, in early November in South Carolina, certainly had plenty of topics to cover.

During the first forum on Wednesday, Let them eat... Everything: Embracing a Patron-Driven Future, we were given clickers for real-time poll taking. Most interesting for me was the question, "Librarians, do you envision needing PPV, POD, leasing, and PDA? " The majority answer was, "Yes, but will take a lot of time to implement."

When publishers were asked the same question, the answer was, "No, too expensive to implement."

Ouch.

The speaker at this forum, Rick Anderson of the University of Utah, talked about how the current library model—which includes hard-copy Inter-library Lending (ILL); "big deals" with publishers; subscriptions; approval plans; reference/bibliography instruction; redundant cataloging; and print runs—is "less sane". ("Big deals" involve buying a lot to get some of what you need.) The current model does not make sense.

eBooks are certainly airborne in the US and the UK, but in many other places they're still taxiing, fairly slowly, along the runway. Why? Language is one reason. English-language eBooks are ubiquitous and form the vast majority of all currently available eBooks. All the major global retailers are focused almost exclusively on English-language content. There is a proven demand for English-language eBooks and conversion to ePub is simple and cheap, so almost all publishers are now busy digitizing their front and back lists.

The story is different for non-English language material. As industry guru Mike Shatzkin wrote in a recent blog post: "the reality that everybody in the world has to deal with is that English-language title availability in ePub dwarfs that of all other languages."

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report, Turning the Page - the Future of eBooks, claimed that there are 1.8 million free books available in English via Google books. The report looked in detail at eBooks in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany. It noted that while the number of eBooks in the Netherlands has now grown to 4,000 from 1,000 in 2009, that is trifling compared to the 350,000 printed books in Dutch available on the Dutch market leader bol.com. Similarly, German sites such as buecher.de have over 100,000 German eBooks but this is still only about 8% of the total German printed books available, and many of these are only in PDF rather than in a dedicated eBook format such as ePub.