The Panorama Project has been in the spotlight recently, as IFLA and the Beyond the Book Podcast both interviewed project lead, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, about our work, while Book Riot dug into our recent collaboration with The Washington Post.
Filling the Evidence Gap
The lending of eBooks by libraries remains an area of controversy, with libraries often facing high prices and difficult licencing conditions, while publishers worry about impacts on sales and revenues to authors.
A key challenge in this has been the relative newness of the format, and the lack of a shared evidence-base for understanding both eLending itself, and its interrelation with wider markets. The Panorama Project is aiming to address this. We interviewed Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Project Lead, to find out more.
How well does anyone understand the eBook market and the place of libraries within it today?
The answer really depends on your perspective and priorities. The size of the overall consumer ebook market is difficult to measure because Amazon owns a significant percentage of it, especially on the self-publishing side, and they don’t publicly share any useful data. OverDrive is the dominant player on the library side, but NPD Bookscan doesn’t track ebook sales the same way they do print, and the American Association of Publishers (AAP) doesn’t break out library sales at all, so there’s no authoritative industry source for context.
Individual publishers generally have a good sense of where their ebook revenue comes from, but it’s mostly “last-click attribution” which heavily favors Amazon and OverDrive, and they generally don’t have a good sense of which factors might be impacting their consumer sales. They also don’t have deep data on what drives those sales, including the role of discoverability through libraries, nor any useful insights into print circulation. The combination of fragmentation and lack of transparency is one of the primary reasons the Panorama Project was initiated.
How to be an Anti-Racist Reader (And Publisher)
In June, the Washington Post and the Panorama Project reviewed the lending history of public library systems across the country and developed nine regional reading lists related to civil rights, and race and ethnic relations—reflecting the diverse interests and perspectives of readers in each region.
“Ultimately we came to develop this project, which was a customized version of Panorama Picks by looking at books that kept appearing on recommended reading llsts and books that had resurfaced on the bestseller lists,” says Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, project lead, Panorama Project.
The data search required a creative approach that harvested titles across a range of subject areas.
“Anti-racism is ultimately a marketing term that’s been created to reflect a certain area of interest. It’s not one that publishers recognize as a selling category,” Gonzalez tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
What Anti-Racism Books Were Americans Requesting at Their Libraries?
During the pandemic lockdown, the American public may not have had physical access to their local libraries. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t utilizing the digital resources provided by their library — even before the murder of George Floyd sparked a groundswell of protests nationwide, anti-racism books drew wide requests across the country. In conjunction with The Washington Post, The Panorama Project, which provides local booksellers with lists of fiction and nonfiction that are seeing demand regionally, dove into the data to explore what anti-racism books were seeing demand at US libraries.
For more information on the Panorama Project, read our Annual Report and join our mailing list to receive future updates.