May 2013

E-Books and Democracy

[Commentary] The information revolution raises profound questions about the future of books, reading and libraries. While publishers have been nimble about marketing e-books to consumers, until very recently they’ve been mostly unwilling to sell e-books to libraries to lend, fearful that doing so would hurt their business, which is under considerable pressure.

Negotiations between the nation’s libraries and the Big Six publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster, which publish roughly two-thirds of the books in America — have gone in fits and starts. Today Hachette, which had been a holdout, is joining the others in announcing that it will make e-books available to public libraries. This is a big step, as it represents, for the first time, a consensus among the Big Six, at least in principle, that their e-books should be made available to library users. Over a quarter of New York City’s 8.2 million residents borrow books from the city’s three public library systems. For those who cannot afford to buy downloads, digital books from libraries are essential to improving literacy, civic engagement and the technological facility necessary for economic success.

[Marx is the president of the New York Public Library]

Craving Wi-Fi, Preferably Free and Really Fast

Travelers hitting the road with their mobile electronic devices have three questions about staying connected away from home: will there be Wi-Fi, how much will it cost and how well will it work?

Increasingly, it is that last question that matters most. Hotels, airports and airlines are struggling to keep up with customers streaming movies on their tablets and hosting online meetings on their laptops, with varying degrees of success. While hoteliers and airport authorities have been fighting the bandwidth battle for years, airlines are still installing Wi-Fi on many aircraft and are already confronting challenges. Travelers who want Wi-Fi in the air cannot always tell if a plane will have Internet service when they book their tickets. Prices for service are still evolving, and the quality of the connection does not come close to matching what most people are used to on the ground.

Why Aren't Smartphones Making Us More Productive?

We regard smartphones as game devices, Web browsers and messaging tools. But at heart they are like all computers before them. They are efficiency engines, a means of saving time, bridging distance, reducing cost. Yet there's something bizarre going on. Even as an estimated 130 million smartphones roam the U.S. streets, economists can't quite find them.

By that I mean they can't find how these mobile devices are improving worker productivity, which computers have been doing quite ruthlessly for the last 70 years. Productivity is the reason living standards rise. It's why we have more goods and services than our grandparents could imagine. The official U.S. productivity numbers are low when compared with the stunning 3% yearly gains of the first Web era, roughly 1995 to 2004. In fact, annual productivity growth since 2004 is about 1.5%, below even the long-term average of 2.25%. It's as if a time-wasting flock of Angry Birds has buried productivity like a worm. Classically defined, an increase in productivity either reduces labor, improves output, or both. And by that measure, argues Northwestern University economist Robert J. Gordon, the iPhone "has done absolutely nothing" to improve productivity. So is there something wrong with the government numbers? Or, more intriguing, are we overestimating how these little machines can affect living standards? The answers are wonky and, inconclusive. For now, we're left in the fallible realm of impressions. Here the relevant question seems to be: Can you find an area of life and business not being affected by the devices?

Duke University Withdraws From Online Course Group

Duke University has pulled out of Semester Online, an education consortium that will offer online undergraduate courses for credit, after faculty members objected.

The consortium announced April 30 that it would offer 11 courses this fall, from Boston College, Brandeis, Emory, Northwestern, the University of North Carolina, Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis. But the Arts and Sciences Council at Duke, which represents faculty members from the university’s largest undergraduate college, voted 16 to 14 last week against participating in the consortium. While Peter Lange, the Duke provost, saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some faculty members worried that the long-term effect might be for the university to offer fewer courses — and hire fewer professors. Others said there had been inadequate consultation with the faculty.

Senior Congressman and Newcomer Win Senate Nods in Massachusetts

Representative Edward J. Markey, who has spent almost four decades in the House, has cleared the first hurdle in his drive to become a United States senator, easily defeating a fellow congressman, Stephen F. Lynch, in Massachusetts’s Democratic primary. On the Republican side, Gabriel E. Gomez, a former member of the Navy SEALs and a newcomer to politics, won a three-way primary.

He and Rep Markey will face off in a special general election on June 25 to fill the Senate seat left vacant by John Kerry, a Democrat who resigned this year to become President Obama’s secretary of state. Given the Democrats’ strength in Massachusetts, Rep Markey would have to be considered the early favorite. The Senate race offers voters a choice between Mr. Markey’s decades of experience in Washington — he was first elected to Congress in 1976 — and Gomez’s compelling life story. The son of Colombian immigrants, he became a Navy pilot and a member of the SEALs, attended Harvard Business School and is now a private equity investor. Rep Markey, 66, who has one of the most liberal voting records in Congress, has promised to continue his fight for gun control, a clean environment, abortion rights and Mr. Obama’s health care law.

Benton

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