I’m going to e-book summer camp! This week I’ll be taking my first trip to Digipalooza, the annual user conference sponsored by leading library e-book platform provider OverDrive that runs August 5–7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Sure, some people prefer the beach in August. But I must say, there is no place I’d rather be this week than in Ohio, talking with librarians about e-books.

Now in its fifth year, Digipalooza has grown steadily in popularity, attracting hundreds of librarians who come for a program that is 100% focused on digital media in public libraries and schools. Sessions range from the nuts and bolts to the big picture, including a publishers’ panel and a closing Crystal Ball Report from OverDrive CEO Steve Potash.

If you’re there too, please introduce yourself—I’ll be on a panel on Thursday, August 6, at 9:30 a.m., with American Library Association president Sari Feldman, the former cochair of the ALA’s Digital Content Working Group (DCWG) and director of the Cuyahoga County [Ohio] Public Library. I’d love to hear about your experiences with e-books in libraries.

As I head off to Cleveland, I have many questions about the state of the library e-book market for which I hope to get some answers. Here are just a few topics that will be foremost in my mind.

New Models?

Without question, the library e-book market has had good news in recent years: all the major publishers are now involved with library e-book lending after years of tension. But over the last few ALA meetings, and at BookExpo America this year, programs on e-books in libraries have taken a noticeable turn: they’ve sought to highlight new platforms and models, and have pushed for more experimentation. (For example, at the 2015 ALA Annual Conference, held last month in San Francisco, the DCWG session featured reps from upstart service providers Odilo and Total Boox.) And that’s because, even with the progress of the last few years, e-books remain fraught with challenges for libraries. Prices for library e-books are often significantly higher than consumer prices, for instance, taxing budgets. And most e-books come with a variety of restrictions—such as lend limits and expiration dates, which vary from publisher to publisher.

But, from my perspective, the greatest looming challenge for libraries comes from streaming media services such as those from Amazon, Apple, Spotify, and Netflix. Add to that mix new consumer e-book subscription services, such as Oyster and Scribd. In the tablet age, where all content is now accessible on the same screen, there is much competition for user attention. As I see it, digital media is entering a new era, and streaming services are rapidly redefining user expectations for how they access content. And that includes reading, where new generations of readers—those born in the tablet era—will surely question why they have to endure cumbersome checkout procedures, or, worse, wait on a holds list to read a book, when they can seamlessly access massive catalogs of songs, movies, and other media instantly.

If there is one topic I hope to hear Steve Potash address in his Crystal Ball Report, it is how he sees e-book access playing out. OverDrive (and its competitors) can enable any and all access models publishers are comfortable with. So how much longer will library e-books be stuck with an analog-era access model in the digital age? And if publishers are going to experiment with new commercial access models—such as subscriptions—why not experiment with libraries, too?

This past January, I cautioned librarians against viewing basic access to e-books as success and urged them to continue to agitate for more experimentation. And that’s because with publishers now able to say, “Yes, we work with libraries,” libraries risk settling on a plateau of mediocrity that could leave them as second-class e-book providers, as new, affordable commercial reading services emerge.

Yes, access is important. But isn’t how we access e-books in libraries equally important? How can we improve the user experience in libraries? And whether it’s a one-copy/one-user model or pay per access, are libraries getting a sense of what might be the most efficient use of their budgets?

School Libraries?

As I prepare to head out to Digipalooza, Capital New York reports that the New York Department of Education is set to approve a $30 million contract with Amazon to create “an e-book marketplace for New York City’s 1,800 public schools.” It would be one of DOE’s biggest contracts, and, according to the department’s request, the underbidder was OverDrive.

The move is not entirely unexpected: a recent report in PW by school librarian columnists Margaux DelGuidice and Rose Luna noted that Amazon, through its Whispercast service, is making serious inroads in the school library market. But I’m not sure how to feel about this news.

I am by no stretch an anti-Amazon guy. For all its troubles, I think Amazon has brought great innovation to the book business. But given my experience on the consumer side, I do have concerns about how an Amazon push into the school e-book market will play out. For example, are we about to hand over to Amazon the data it needs to create market profiles for every student in New York City? The Capital New York report notes that all the content secured under the deal can be used on a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and Macs. But the DOE documents also note that each student will have an “individualized profile.”

But putting the current vagaries of the e-book market aside, the bigger question I have is, what school library e-book market? From what I’ve seen thus far, here in New York, at least, e-books are still in the early days in schools. Is this changing? Is the school e-book market maturing? And if Amazon becomes a player, what does this mean for how students will come to read digitally outside of school?

Data = Marketing

Data and privacy are of course major issues in the digital world. But for libraries, the question is not only how libraries protect patron privacy, but increasingly how libraries might use patron data to better market their current services and create innovative new programs.

One of the things I am most interested in is talking with librarians about how they market their e-book collections. Part of this is collection development, of course, which OverDrive and other services support very well. But data also plays an expanding role here—how are librarians using, or perhaps contemplating the use of, data from e-book use to drive readership?

Certainly, OverDrive collects a lot of user data, and that data can inform many decisions in the library. But I wonder, what could librarians really do with all that data—with full disclosure and the consent of their patrons, of course—if they wanted to?

As PW columnist Peter Brantley wrote earlier this year, in the print era, libraries sought to protect patron privacy by throwing away user data as soon as possible, as a matter of policy. But “the risk of social irrelevance,” Brantley wrote, now requires libraries to use data—just as Amazon and other consumer sites do—to develop services that will ensure the library’s viability in the digital age. The key challenge for libraries, he observed, is how to “mitigate the dangers of data collection” while also balancing “data collection practices with privacy expectations in order to enable valuable, innovative new services.”

So, how is that going? How might it go? Indeed, the data issue came up at ALA, during the DCWG session, as a question for Odilo and Total Boox about how they kept, stored, and managed their data, what data they need to function, and how their data is shared.

Once again, this is just one of the many subjects I am not only interested in hearing about as it is happening in libraries today, but also as something Steve Potash might address in his Crystal Ball Report. And there are myriad other issues and questions I hope to illuminate at Digipalooza, as well. Look for my full report in PW next week.