Shelter-in-place measures required by the pandemic boosted the value of delivery convenience, e-commerce and leisure activities at home, such as reading. TAG benefited from all three aspects. On the other hand, Covid brought along the economic crisis and cuts in inessential spending by consumers.
TAG saw its subscription churn increase, particularly in the first weeks. Despite having a physical book as its core product, TAG considers it sells a service through experience. Experimentation is part of our product. The anticipation is part of our business proposal. Much of the customer experience is digital, especially on the Cabeceira app, which registers almost , downloads.
Through it, readers can discuss books and talk about literature with other members, as well as set goals, calculate and monitor the pace of their reading, and discover new titles. TAG currently offers two types of subscription.
The business book club will be the third subscription option. Members of Curadoria receive an exclusive hardcover book edition and more background about each literary title.
Causes that TAG defends — such as the value of reading, the importance of libraries and a sense of community among customers — are central to its business model. According to Dambros, the club is not just a group of people who happen to receive the same product at home. There lies our strength. I like my books to be pristine too! I love used books, The more writings and evidence of other readers, the better. Old books need an appropriate place to display their beauty tho, I have a thrift store library and the makings of a thrift store art gallery in a gallery of cast away collectables.
I devour cheap and new made books with a hungry vigor, they leave their marks on me! None of your recent posts are appearing on Google search? Stopped about a month ago.
Your most recent post would normally come up first, also no post indication on your blog calendar of any posts. Do people borrow the books or buy them? Oh, thanks for letting me know. Mostly Just lend out, play the match maker. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.
Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Do you have a certain place at home for reading? Bookmark or random piece of paper? Multitasking: Music or TV while reading? Do you eat or drink while reading? Reading at home or everywhere? One book at a time or several at once? Rate this:. Like this: Like Loading Next Bookshelf Tour, Pt. Pingback: How I Read Books. Oh no. Lol a dilemma indeed!
A Thought. Gee thanks! Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. For decades, libraries have been using barcodes and tattle tapes to handle the two issues. RFID technology, however, has emerged recently with its capability to handle both item identification and security in an all-in-one manner. What more is, the contactless nature of the technology enables multiple book identification and thus can greatly improve loan transaction efficiency.
The memory of RFID tags makes RFID more than just an identification technology but a data carrier that can keep track of the circulation status of the item concerned to ensure security and to store other necessary item information that facilitates collection management.
While the number of libraries adopting RFID technology is on the rise, nonetheless, many libraries are still stationing in the electro-magnetic domain of tattle tapes and barcodes observing the trend. At least this is the case in Mainland China and Hong Kong. For many libraries, the decision to migrate to a new technology hinges not just to the capability of the technology concerned, but cost-benefit analysis and return on investment.
The report mentions that a large cost associated with the adoption of RFID is the expense on tags. Apart from the tag costs, tagging itself is also very labour intensive. New equipment, although costly, is comparable to the electro-magnetic systems currently in use in many libraries Engel, Since the survey was conducted in , in fact the prices of tags have dropped, but migrating to a new technology still involves huge investment.
To many libraries, barcodes and tattle tapes are still better choices because they have been in place for many years and have proved to be reliable, functional and stable. Adopting a new technology, however, involves risks and a lot of sunk costs in terms of technology research, product evaluation and testing, staff training, as well as new service development and planning. After all, barcodes are widely recognized means of identifying items though they do need lines of sight and support single item identification for each scan only.
Standards for barcodes have been well established and barcode scanners of almost any brand name can be tuned to read any barcode schema and thus there is no interoperability issue for resource sharing among libraries. The different RFID data models used in different systems however create obstacles for interoperability in the case of RFID tags as explained later in this chapter. Thus, without ensured interoperability and cost savings, many libraries are hesitant to change to any new technology.
Thus, even though the 2-D barcodes nowadays have presented another possible choice for libraries to upgrade their barcode system so as to store more item information for books, very few libraries, if any, have chosen to do so. Some libraries, however, have adopted 2-D barcodes in other contexts, such as enriching holding information on library catalogues, providing web links to users on promotional brochures and alike.
Although 2-D barcodes are comparatively newer technology, they are not backward compatible. Scanners for the traditional 1-D barcodes cannot read 2-D barcodes either. To change, it means hardware replacement and thus capital investment. So, if the traditional 1-D barcodes are good enough to store the basic information in most cases, the unique accession number of the book concerned to support any circulation transactions, why do the libraries need to bother about changing their 1-D barcodes to 2-D barcodes, not to mention about RFID tags?
For the case of tattle tapes, the common product specifications and requirements as well as the aggregate demand across different libraries have created the possibility for group purchase to drive the costs down.
For example, among all the university libraries in Hong Kong, there are regular joint tendering exercises for bulk purchase of tattle tapes. The lessons learnt from the stories of barcodes and tattle tapes is that for UHF RFID technology despite its strengths and potentials to enhance library operations to be widely adopted among libraries, standardization, interoperability, aggregate demand supported by common product requirements are the necessary conditions to drive the costs down to ensure value for money.
Moreover, efforts and sunk costs involved in technology research, evaluation and testing should be minimized through experience sharing among libraries. After all, choosing the right tags is important as the tags are the souls that RFID-enable the books to make them identifiable throughout the RFID process. The performance of the RFID system hinges very much on the performance of the tags. The expenses for tags with good performance, however, can be more significant when compared to the costs associated with the first-time one-off investment in hardware, especially when the collection to be converted is big.
Moreover, the demand for tags is recurrent and ongoing throughout the years as the collection expands annually and so do the expenses. Similar to the case of tattle tapes, should libraries be able to agree on common requirements to ensure standardization, interoperability and compatibility, the aggregate demand will guarantee quality and sustainable supply of UHF RFID tags as well as the opportunity for consortial purchase to bargain for bigger discounts and long-term cost savings.
In the logistics industry, tags are for one-off use only. Nonetheless, for libraries, the tags have ever-lasting roles in the book circulation transactions, perhaps until the books concerned are withdrawn from the collection. Tags in libraries need to go through repeated check-in and check-out processes throughout the years and its anti-theft capability must last as long as the books concerned are still part of the library collection.
Moreover, tags in libraries serve at the item level. Almost every book bears a tag and that constitutes to a dense tag environment. What complicates the case is the production life cycle of tags. Libraries cannot guarantee that they can use the same brands or the same models of tags throughout the years because of tag evolution.
Thus, the dense tag environment will be one with a mixture of tags. Compatibility of tags of different generations to the same machines acquired years ago is a concern.
Other well known issues that libraries may consider also include compliance with regulatory standards, data model, interoperability among libraries, shapes of tags, read range and distance, physical mounting issues such as adhesive, position, orientation, suitability of the selected tags for efficient reading by foreseeable new applications e.
All these different considerations have something to do with the business nature of libraries and also the unique local situation and environments, or even loan rules of different individual libraries.
Thus user behavior and expectation are determining factors too. All the tags concerned are passive tags. Table 1 provides a snapshot of the tags that have been tested so far. To protect the interest of the tag suppliers and companies concerned, the brand names of the tags concerned are represented by the English alphabets only. The most distinctive features of the tags are listed in the table. The country of origin and also the EPC memory size of the tags are also provided.
It is hoped that by sharing the findings, the other libraries that are also interested in adopting UHF RFID can benefit too or at least reduce their sunk costs in product testing and evaluation. To choose the right tags, the Project Group recommends that libraries concerned should pay attention to the following areas:. The very basic consideration is compliance to standards. It defines the frequency range, commands, memory bank and protocols for tags and it has been approved and included in the international standard organization ISO C.
As RFID makes use of radio waves, the technology is subject to governance by the radio telecommunication ordinance of each individual country. The following are some examples:. Each band is divided into 20 channels, each consisting of kHz of spectrum. The tags that the Working Group has tested so far see Table 1 can support frequency range from MHz — MHZ and thus should have no frequency compatibility issue. However, caution should still be taken by libraries to ensure that their selected tags support the UHF RFID frequency bandwidth of the country or region where they belong to.
Data models define the requirements for data elements and structure on the RFID tags and are somehow related to the standardization issue too.
To ensure interoperability which is essential for interlibrary loan and resource sharing among libraries, data stored in the tags must be readable and usable by all libraries concerned irrespective of the UHF RFID system that they are using, whether the system comes from company A or company B. Therefore, data model standards are the keys to interoperability. They include data models from Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK and Finland that are examples of fixed memory models. ISO as an international standard which consists of 3 parts to provide general guidelines on the data elements and incorporate both the fixed memory approach and flexible memory approach came into place only in Therefore, while UHF RFID is making its way into the library arena, libraries should take the opportunity to first compromise on the data model standards.
However, instead of accepting whatever proprietary data models that the vendors may propose, libraries should present their own specifications to ensure vendor independence. Such specifications should at least be a consortial consensus among libraries that will have interlibrary loans among themselves, or preferably, a regional or national data model standard. Specifications as such are critical to the choice of tags as sufficient tag memory to support the data model standard concerned is a must.
Therefore, libraries should first make up their mind on the data model that they will adopt before making their tag selection or starting their tag conversion exercise. Once a certain data model is formatted in the tags, it cannot be easily transformed and rewritten. The table below shows the structure of this byte data model. The fixed length structure ensures that each data element is given its designed memory address to enable speedy identification of data location even without a precursor.
Thus, the byte data model as outlined below is tailor made for the CityU HK Library only to suit its local circumstances and may not be suitable for other libraries. As tags of bits or even larger EPC memory sizes are now available in the market, the Project Team can re-consider adopting a more flexible data model that can cater for more scenarios and possibly fits all UHF RFID libraries. The lessons learnt from the stories of barcodes and tattle tapes as well as the evolution history of the data model standards for HF RFID have enlightened the CityU HK Library Management on the importance of standardization and interoperability.
The data model so proposed by the Project Team should also be a regional consensus if not international. Thus, discussion and exchange of ideas with different stakeholders are the essential next steps. The conference has attracted a total of participants from Mainland China and Hong Kong. JULAC members include libraries of the following universities:. Tags of bits EPC memory are now available and some brand names even claim to have bits. Moreover, apart from EPC memory, some suppliers can also provide an extendable memory that reaches bits in their tags.
Therefore, storage capacity is no longer an issue. What important rather is the choice of data elements. Among the dozens of data elements outlined in ISO, libraries are to choose their own sets of data. Based on the description in ISO, libraries have the flexibility to choose any other data elements that suit their local operations and circumstances. However, libraries should be cautious that the amount of data elements that they choose to include into the tags will affect the memory size and thus, the storage capacity of the tags they will need.
The natural logic is that the more data a library would like to store in the tags, the larger the tag memory it will require. Moreover, between EPC memory and user memory, libraries will also need to decide what data elements are to be housed in the EPC memory and what data are to be housed in the user memory. In this regard, the reading speeds of different memory banks in the tags should also be taken into consideration. In terms of storage capacity, the different brand names of tags see Table 2 that the CityU HK Library has tested so far are mainly of two types.
The first type comes purely with EPC memory only and the second type comes with both the EPC memory bank and the user memory bank in a single tag. The intention of the tests performed by the Project Team was to find out how different the reading speed can be for tags with different memory sizes. Test 1 compared the reading speed for tags with different EPC memory sizes 96 bits versus bits from a selected brand name Brand I.
Comparing tags from the same brand name ensured that all other possible deviations due to the difference in suppliers could be minimized. Test 2 compared the reading speed of tags with different memory combinations EPC memory versus EPC memory plus user memory , again from the same brand name only, though this brand name Brand II is different from the brand name used in Test 1. For Test 1 and Test 2, both the 1-tag scenario and the multi-tag scenario 10 tags have been involved have been examined.
For both scenarios, the one tag or the ten tags concerned were read times and the reading speed of each time was recorded.
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