Robert P. Holley - Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries

Katina Strauch, the founder of the Charleston Conference (and a leader of the editorial board of this series of books), has a fantastic vision and drive, as anyone who knows her will attest. The first time I met her, someone brought her to our offices (also located in Charleston) for a show-and-tell tour. As she wandered into BookSurge in 2003, I am sure she was uncertain what to make of the ragtag bunch trying to change the publishing industry.

Our offices were uptown behind a fried chicken restaurant dumpster and next to a bingo parlor that was held up at gunpoint as we conducted meetings in the front office one day. We found bullet casings in the parking lot all the time. Despite these bleak surroundings, she was nice to me, she was curious about the publishing and print-on-demand business we had built out of those humble beginnings, and she made me a part of her conference the following year. We became friends, and she continues to be an inspiration to me.

Several years later, she invited me to put together a plenary session on libraries and self-publishing for the Charleston Conference. At that point, I had sold BookSurge to Amazon.com, had moved to Seattle to integrate the company and technology, and had come a long way from those ragtag, strip mall, bingo parlor days. I worked at Amazon for two years after the sale, helping to turn BookSurge into CreateSpace, now the worlds largest and most successful self-publishing company.

I suppose as an early self-publishing visionaryand because I was now a part of the library industry with our new company BiblioLabsshe thought I would be good to put together the plenary. It was a huge hit. It was one of those Charleston Conference sessions where people pour over into the hallways and ask questions remotely while watching on closed-circuit television in another room. We definitely felt like we were onto something.

The next year, she asked if I could do a preconference on the same topic. I jumped at the chance and was able to convince some of the best brains and the most entertaining people in the library and publishing world to come debate the topic for half a day. It was an inspiring day for everyone who attended and had a chemistry I have yet to see in a conference of its type.

This resulting book is the product of the conversation Charles Watkinson and I had afterward. At the time, Charles was the director of Purdue University Press, and he had delivered a fantastic presentation on what he was doing within the organization to facilitate self-publishing. We were still buzzing from the days activity and discussing how the day had uncovered more honest ways to think about and talk about self-publishing in academia. I had called the preconference Self Pub 2.0, attempting to convey the idea that self-publishing was a technology revolution entering a new phasethat at the end of the day technology could be applied in any way the imagination saw fit.

I still got resistance to the name of the preconference. The words self-publishing had a scarlet letter feel, the lingering effect of the vanity publishing era where printers dubiously sold truckloads of books to ambitious authors. My perspective on this was shaped early in my BookSurge career. In 2001, one of my partners at the time, Jeff Schwaner, calmly told a room of New York City publishers who were accusing self-publishing companies of being vanity publishers: All publishing is vain, and that is OK.

I stuck to my guns on the name and knew I was right when Charles (one of the leaders of the libraries as publishers movement) said to me in our conversation afterward, I realize now this is not library publishing, but library-facilitated self-publishing. I felt a bit of the scarlet leave the letter as he said it. I am very proud to have had that spark lead to this important book.

The articles you will find here are an excellent course in the thinking surrounding the marriage of self-publishing and libraries. I was happy to see the text depart from a strict academic context to create a mesh of perspectives that let all range of libraries learn from the experiences of others. Publics, academics, and community college libraries all are represented here.

Several themes strike me throughout the book, including 1) the power of self-publishing as a generator of primary source materials, 2) the effects of Amazon on the role of libraries, and 3) the changing business of publishing (in large part driven by the aforementioned retailing powerhouse).

Much credit for this book goes to Bob Holley, a fantastic editor and all-around book wrangler, as well as one of the top library thinkers on the issue of self-publishing. During the original Self Pub 2.0 preconference, he gave us all an increased perspective on self-publishing as a generator of primary source materials. The coverage he gives that topic here is excellent. It reminded me of talking to the director of the Peace Corps Writers program in those early days of self-publishing, who told me, You know half the people in the Peace Corps are writing a book and most of them suck. But you know what? When the Ken Burns of the next generation comes along, and there is no longer a thing called the Peace Corps, it wont matter that they suck. Self-publishing providesand will continue to providean unprecedented record of human history and experience. I am happy to see Bob so articulately cover this topic, as well as give several other strong arguments for why academic libraries should acquire self-published materials.

Several authors deal with the topic of Amazon from the author perspective, but Bob Nardini and Eleanor Cook point out the real challenges Amazon poses to the institution of the library as the world moves more indie. Nardini, after giving a landscape of library vendor options, correctly points out that Amazon (not any library vendor) is the database of record for self-published and indie books, because authors think about Amazon first and libraries later.

When I worked at Amazon integrating BookSurge, I once was asked to write a report on the potential for Amazon to get into the library business properly (i.e., MARC records, shelf-ready books, etc.). After writing the report (which did not take a position on whether it was a good or bad idea, just delivered facts), we met with a smart vice president to review the plan. He sat at his desk, read about two paragraphs, and then put the document down. He looked at us and said, Do you realize we are probably the largest seller of books to libraries in the United States, and we have no one in the building thinking about libraries? The meeting ended about two minutes later, and it never came up again.

He was right. Amazon, by simply making things easy to order and then delivering them faster and cheaper than other library vendors, had leapfrogged companies serving libraries for decades without even trying. Visit the receiving area of a library sometime and look at the logos on the boxes if you doubt this.