The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books (newyorker.com) 20
Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do. From a report:Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks -- i.e., "digital content." In New York, Potash met with two clients: the New York Public Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. By then, Potash had already heard what he described to me recently as "heart-wrenching stories" from colleagues in China, about neighborhoods that were shut down owing to the coronavirus. He had an inkling that his business might be in for big changes when, toward the end of the week, on March 13th, the N.Y.P.L. closed down and issued a statement: "The responsible thing to do -- and the best way to serve our patrons right now -- is to help minimize the spread of COVID-19." The library added, "We will continue to offer access to e-books."
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries -- they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books "a lot more expensive, in general, than print books," Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver's public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries -- they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books "a lot more expensive, in general, than print books," Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver's public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
I really don't care anymore (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
The solution to this problem is the same as it's always been. Open-source gave us free software with few restrictions, and no cost. Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] does the same for digital media. The missing part is people willing to do the work...for free, while maintaining acceptable quality standards. Solve that and the library issues goes away because all content loaned out will be CC.
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Yes THOSE books are. Nothing stops you or anyone else from writing a like-minded book.
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I think few people will be tempted by "Lord of the Rinks" or any other (probably copyright infringing) knock offs of well known fiction works.
Re: You're an imbecile ... (Score:3)
Ostracus blathered:
The solution to this problem is the same as it's always been. Open-source gave us free software with few restrictions, and no cost. Creative Commons [creativecommons.org] does the same for digital media. The missing part is people willing to do the work...for free, while maintaining acceptable quality standards. Solve that and the library issues goes away because all content loaned out will be CC.
There are no such people.
FOSS is typically written by teams of people, each of whom contributes a small part of their overall effort to a particular project, while doing the majority of their work for an employer, who pays them for their time. Fiction and well-researched non-fiction are almost without exception the products of single individuals who spend their work lives researching and writing. It's the combination of a singular vision, and the sustained effort necessary to realize it i
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"Buying a real book doesn't come with an expiration date."
If you don't fall asleep in the bathtub.
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I've dropped lots of books in the bathtub. Even completely soaked, if you're willing to deal with crinkly pages and a spine that's disintegrated, it's still a readable book.
Deadtree is surprisingly reliable.
Better than renting your books.
And despite people's assertions, the biggest cost of a book isn't the printing/warehousing - we've been doing this for centuries and it's so efficient, no more than 10% of the
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No power required! And you can sell it too.
No first sale doctrine for digital content?!? (Score:2)
Re:No first sale doctrine for digital content?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't have a first sale doctrine, if there are no sales at all.
As people become more and more tolerant of licensing as an alternative to buying, and also more and more tolerant of nonstandard files or interfaces (i.e. situations where the user can't decouple media from its player), I think you'll hear less and less about your quaint, obsolete "first sale doctrine."
OTOH, you'll continue to hear about piracy endlessly, since pirates will remain the only available source of standard-format media. If you want media that you can use however you see fit (as though you had bought it in a pre-DMCA time when first sale doctrine was still a thing, rather than today's post-modern experience of licensing access to a server to send an ephemeral copy to your proprietary player), the industry does not want your money. Fortunately, piracy provides a solution to the "we don't want your money" problem too.
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More exactly, the first sale doctrine covers the limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. The key word being "products", and is why you can re-sell your physical copy of a video game, but not the digital version of the exact same game.
LOL (Score:2)
Pay for ebooks? never.
Borrow for a bit from libraries, OK.
Maybe I can donate a few bucks to my local library to help them support people.
I have literally thousands of paper books sitting around. I'd rather just dump the non-autographed ones.
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I will never buy a DRM encumbered book/CD/DVD/whatever, except maybe for a game. Only because I game on a PS4 so the PC hoodwinks don't apply to me.
I don't get ebooks from the library because
a) They start the loan period from when it's available, not when I check it out
b) The loan period is 2 weeks instead of the normal 3 weeks
c) I can't renew the book.
My library strategy is I have 1 book I'm reading, and 1 book I'm waiting on. This works maybe 80% of the time, most books take me 4-5
OpenLibrary (Score:2)
Anyway, most of the problems with BS licensing terms would go away if countries
All E-content should be NFT (Score:2)
So you can resell at will at market prices.
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Just makes freebees that much easier (Score:2)
Step 1: Overdrive sells rights of book to library.
Step 2: Somebody uploads it to bittorrent site
Step 3: Millions download it for free
Step 4: No profit.