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E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians
- ainiriand 7y agoWhat is more important, culture or company profits?
- kozak 7y agoFor a company, it's obviously profits. Without them, the company will cease existing.
- ohithereyou 7y agoApparently neither if the book publisher actually refuses to sell the ebook to libraries. It's almost like they want people to pirate it.
- zajd 7y agoCompany profits are our culture
- ctdonath 7y agoCompany profits indicate what is important to a culture.
- ainiriand 7y agoIndicate, not dictate, like it seems to be the case. In this case it looks like the company profit is deciding how the culture should be given to the population. There has to be some wiggle room here between company profits and general access to culture I think.
- helpPeople 7y agoNew question, what if it's not "company", but individual? Do we not support people who put their resources into a book? Also obligatory false dichotomy.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago> Do we not support people who put their resources into a book? Another false dichotomy. Why does "support" equal banning libraries from buying books for 8 weeks, when anybody else can buy them freely?
- sib 7y agoI guess I'd call that "property rights" - the owner of the book (or its digital version) should be able to sell or not sell to whomever she wants.
- Merrill 7y agoThese are books for which there is high demand within 8 weeks of publication, so culture is not a factor.
- meuk 7y ago> very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format Either that's bullshit, or the costs are entirely artificial. I really, really want "Concrete mathematics" by Donald Knuth. I really, really don't want to pay €80 for it. A good alternative for me would be the e-book, but it isn't any cheaper. I doubt if anyone will buy the ebook for that price while there are free copies available online.
- diffeomorphism 7y agoConcrete Mathematics is 672 pages, hardcover for $72 on amazon. Lord of the Rings is 3 hardcover books, 1214 pages total for $39 dollars. Considering that you get much more "book" out of the second one, the content seems to be most of the price. Similarly, if you look at China-only copies of math books, you pay about $10 (IIRC), which gets you admittedly bad quality paper and binding but still makes the publishers money.
- dgacmu 7y agoIt's entirely dependant upon volume. According to [0], the average US non-fiction book will sell under 3,000 copies in its lifetime. For the proceeds from that to pay the author, editor, and marketing... Well, that's not a lot of copies to amortize those salaries across. The numbers are obviously very different for a New York times best seller, where physical goods costs will represent a larger fraction of the cost. But most books aren't NYT bestsellers, (even? Particularly?) When they're by Knuth on advanced topics. :) you could call paying all of the people involved in the process of creating a book artificial, but if we don't, we don't get more books. [0] https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1394159 https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1394159
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoCoincidentally, it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book. So, what, say $1 per book pays for that. The rest pays the author. But wait! Authors only get a buck or two royalty per book. So why do they cost so much? Use your imagination.
- pdkl95 7y ago> consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy That expectation is justified, because bits haven't been a scarce resource ever since Shannon's digital circuits drove marginal cost of copying a file to approximately zero. > very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format If the market isn't willing to pay that price, then their business model isn't sustainable. Blaming libraries and attempting to make their product artificially scarce (with rate-limiting contracts or technical tricks ("DRM") at best only postpone the business model's eventual failure. While it would be unfortunate if authoring books became unsustainable, the publishers may not be needed. That's what capitalism does: it removes inefficiency, including middlemen that no longer strictly required.. > Potash said that studies consistently show library patrons to be more frequent book buyers overall—which is another reason Macmillan’s letter stung. “They are taking their readers, their customers, their fans, and intentionally trying to frustrate them,” he said. Giving your actual paying (even indirectly through a library) customers a worse experience than they could get by sim0ply downloading a pirated copy is always a bad idea. It takes a long time to rebuild from a bad reputation. However, the bigger problem is failing to recognize that the real competition is for people's attention. Rate-limiting or otherwise restricting libraries is throwing away the most important resource: people's awareness that your product even exists. Do you want free advertising even when people read your book for free, or do you want fade into obscurity without even the possibility of making a sale? > The licensing model for libraries and e-books itself is complex and difficult to explain to outsiders. That's intentional, because they are trying to use complex tricks to artificially recreate scarcity instead of adapting to a new business model.
- iamtheworstdev 7y agoBut the cost of printing a book isn't exactly high. Most of the cost of a book is in the author, editorial staff, and other human services. The manufacturing is near nil.
- Hitton 7y agoUsually I'm against restrictions like this, but this doesn't seem that bad. It's only for ebooks and for first 8 weeks, with people waiting years for the next book of their favourite author, waiting 2 more months when they are not willing to buy that book is nothing.
- moate 7y agoThe book is being bought. The libraries aren't getting these books for free. If you, private citizen Hitton, want to buy this book the day it's released and then lend it out to every single person you know, you're able to do this. Why shouldn't the library? Also, there are lending limits on e-books from libraries. It's not as if the library can buy the e-book and then lend it out simultaneously to 20,000 people. They're already required to rate limit how many people can have an e-book checked out at once.
- rini17 7y agoThe limit of 1 (one) copy per library described in article seems fully reasonable to you?
- moate 7y agoNo, of course not. That's my point. OP is throwing out a "let them eat cake" argument about how he's fine with this state of affairs. I'm pointing out that the libraries are buying these e-books in order to lend them out. Personally I feel that the publishers are misunderstanding their market. Library people are library people. It's a small, heavy-use userbase. People who buy books the second they come out aren't going to suddenly become library people because a few dozen more e-books become available early on. There's still limits on how the libraries are allowed to lend them (i.e. they can't buy one book and lend it out 100 times, but they could buy 100 books and lend those out 100 times). This feels like publishers are misunderstanding their users, but at the same time I'm just one user, wtf do I know.
- tadzik_ 7y ago> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it keeps the value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library. With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. Since I'm getting so much less, why should I pay the same price? The digitization makes it impossible for businesses to control the distribution of their products, unless they go full DRM and effectively prevent people from owning the things they buy – but in that case, there should be no surprise that people don't want to pay quite as much.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoThe authors and publishers created this problem and the marketplace is pushing back. I was buying a lot of e-books when they were significantly cheaper than paper. Now that's no longer true and I've renewed my library card for the first time in 20 years. I already own too many paper books and I don't want any more. But I also refuse to pay as much for e-books as paper. Libraries to the rescue.
- avar 7y agoAs a consumer, the digital e-book is inherently more valuable than a physical book. I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books. There's all sorts of other value, like search functions, not having to fill my house or storage box with books, and avoiding that awkward every-other-page-sucks while reading a book laying sideways in bed.
- nikbackm 7y agoThose are properties of the e-reader rather than the e-book itself, in other words, not something you should be paying for when buying the book.
- fouc 7y agoSeems like libraries should team up and combine their purchasing powers to get more equitable purchase agreements.
- logfromblammo 7y agoThey should team up and use the existing copyright laws in a way that is more suited to their mission. Which is to say they should create their own shared digital-lending infrastructure that does not depend on publishers supplying the e-books. That would provide a significant incentive for publishers to be reasonable enough that public libraries don't cut them out of the loop entirely using the first-sale doctrine, with books purchased at retail.
- tus88 7y agoI didn't know libraries lent ebooks. Seems kind of strange.
- Freak_NL 7y agoWhy? Some readers want e-books, so not facilitating them means losing readers.
- tus88 7y agoWell I imagine people go to libraries as it's the only way to get physical copies of what they have. Ebooks are obviously more conveniently download from the internet. Or is this ebook a physical device not a download?
- jhbadger 7y agoYou use the Internet to check out a book from the library onto your e-reader, from home, allowing you to read it for free totally legally. The other ways of getting an ebook are generally only one of those last two.
- bovermyer 7y agoTime-limited access to e-books isn't that strange, considering we do similar things with movies (e.g., renting a new release on Google Play).
- reaperducer 7y agoSome (many?) libraries lend out WiFi hot spots so people can have free internet at home. When I lived in New Jersey, the library lent out power tools. The Chicago Public library lends out museum passes. Libraries are about knowledge, not books.
- ForHackernews 7y agoThe Chicago Public Library also lends small toy robots for teaching children about programming: https://www.chipublib.org/news/finch-robots-land-at-cpl/ https://www.chipublib.org/news/finch-robots-land-at-cpl/
- UserIsUnused 7y agoAs usual, RMS is right about DRM.
- selimthegrim 7y agoRMS unfortunately has picked a different hill to die on these days
- Merrill 7y agoNote that pricing of ebooks for libraries is higher than for consumers - https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the-future-of-ebook-pricing/ https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the-fu... >Among the Big Five publishers (HBG, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, PRH, and S&S), pricing for one copy remains excessively high, in the $50 range for two years of library access, compared with the $15 range for perpetual access by consumers. Four of the Big Five now employ a two-year access model, which poses challenges to collection development and preservation. Note also that ebooks come with restrictions that inhibit inter-library loans.
- RyanAF7 7y agoWelcome to the higher education "loose leaf binder" textbooks that cost the same as the texts one used to be able to keep for decades cause it...had a spine. The rise in price for textbooks is almost perfectly correlated with the rise in federal loan and pell grant amounts. Steal your books, fuck those publishers.
- lost_access 7y agoWhat is the logic behind this? A library e-book can be loaned at most 4 times during the 8-week hold off period. Are they after the potential four additional sale? Didn't make any sense to me...
- logfromblammo 7y agoIt seems to me as though an interlibrary alliance could pool resources to create their own digitizations of print-version books. They already pay extra for the library edition of a print book. For that higher price, they are supposed to get more durable covers and paper. For a more expensive e-book, what do they get? Self-destructing DRM. Why would anyone agree to that--especially a library? If it is legal to lend out that physical copy, what is the difference, philosophically, between taking that copy off the shelf and placing it in a reader-proxy robot that can turn pages and focus its camera on them? What is the difference between that and flipping through static photographs of the pages while the physical copy is kept in a "digital lending" vault? What is the difference between that and flipping through pages of OCR-digitized text that correspond to the photographs? And if the physical copy is permanently placed in a defunct mine and no one ever has physical access, what prevents the mine from lending the digital text to any partner library, so they can in turn lend the single digital copy to a person? If the publishers want to play stupid games, award them stupid prizes. Buy the paperback/cheapest edition of the book, shear off the spine, scan both sides of each page in a machine at 1200 dpi, re-bind the pages (plus paper cover) into a corrugated plastic cover, catalog it, and put it in permanent storage. Now OCR the 1200 dpi images, downsample them to 96 dpi, and package the text and low-res images into an e-book. When a user thinks the OCR made an error, the low-res image can establish a page and location, and a rectangle of the high-res image can be delivered from a web interface. The user's guess at the text content can then be verified or rejected by AI--easier than OCR from scratch--and used to update the book file. All the lending software needs to do is verify that no more than N natural persons are looking at the digital files for N real copies at the same time. The physical copy could always be retrieved from storage and shipped to the borrower, after all. The legal copyright model has nothing to do with the time and money costs of physical shipping. A property title can move faster than the speed of light, even when the property itself is immobile. Even if the lending model doesn't work, sell the beneficial interest in the book for $20.00, and then pay $19.99 when they sell it back, the $0.01 representing physical-book storage fees and bandwidth costs. Whether or not the end-user can copy the files they receive is immaterial. I can already borrow a library book and scan every page at home. That would be me violating the copyright, not the library. The burden on the library is to say, "please don't do that, unless it is for legal, fair-use purposes". And the burden of policing it is on the owner/assignee of the copyright. If going along with the copyright system voluntarily is reasonable, people will go along with it voluntarily. If not, people will pirate. This may seem tautological, but increasing forced compliance will reduce voluntary compliance.
- Ajedi32 7y agoI feel it's only natural for this sort of thing to happen, as ultimately the purpose of libraries and the purpose of copyright are in direct opposition to one another. In my view, the primary reason public libraries were created was to provide the public with free access to informational and culturally-relevant media (books, newspapers, movies, audio, etc). Previously, a library's effectiveness in fulfilling that mission was naturally limited by the need for the library to acquire physical copies of every article of media they provided access to, and by the natural geographical restrictions imposed by the need for members to physically travel to the library to view, check out, and return those articles. These limitations made it relatively easy for libraries to coexist with copyright law, as libraries would never be able to compete with the convenience of personal ownership of a physical copy of media. With modern, digital media, such physical limitations are no longer present. Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired and loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy to build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so efficiently and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for personal ownership of media for the vast majority of people. Imagine a national library purchasing 100 copies of a movie, then instantly "checking it out" to you when you stream it to your phone, and "checking it in" as soon as the movie finishes playing or you pause it for more than a minute or two. Such a system could be many orders of magnitude cheaper than our current public library system, while at the same time being far more convenient. They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business overnight. Now apply the same system to books, music, magazines, etc. Why would any significant number of people bother buying any of those forms media ever again?
- moate 7y ago>>Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired and loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy to build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so efficiently and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for personal ownership of media for the vast majority of people. You've just inspired me. How do we make libraries the next "great disruptor"? >>They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business overnight. All of those services are also primary-content creators. They no longer just serve as repositories for content, they also produce unique content that adds value.
- ozfive 7y agoMacmillan should look into putting more covers up on their site for their own books as to the reason their sales are going down. When you don't have the motivation to properly merchandise your products its your own damn fault.
- cr0sh 7y agoI was just at my local library over the weekend, not having stepped inside one for a very long time. I was actually there to get my library card renewed, as I hadn't used it for so long it became out of date. So, I'm browsing the stacks, and see a few books that look intriguing. But here's the thing: I don't have time to check them out and read them. There was a time I could and would do that, but age and responsibilities have cut that short. So - I do what any 21st century citizen with a smartphone does - I searched for them on Amazon. I ended up finding all of the titles on Amazon, but the kicker was that the physical copies of the book (even hardbound!) were cheaper - cheaper! - than the ebook (kindle) version. So - I purchased them; they should arrive at my door in a couple of days. I'll get to read them at my leisure, I won't have to worry about overdue fines or anything like that, and best of all - I have physical copies. Overdrive goes away? Well - I can still read my copies. Publisher decides to revoke the ebook license? Well - I can still read my copies. Long story short: Nothing beats having a unencumbered, non-licensed, non-encrypted copy of a piece of information (physical or otherwise). Without it, you are just borrowing it from someone, and they can take it back at will, and you are SOL. I'm not sure what it's going to take for people - ordinary people - to understand this. Maybe the 50,000th time they have to repurchase the "White Album"?
- fouric 7y ago> If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No. 1 fiction bestseller > Public libraries are engaged in one of the most valuable series of community services for all ages, for all audiences > If you think about equitable access to information for everybody, there shouldn’t be discrimination or anything like that Devil's advocate: the article (and many of the persons mentioned) seem to be discussing primarily works of fiction, not e.g. textbooks or technical reference books. How is this part of "a valuable series of community services"? It seems like they just want the ability to consume more entertainment media for free, and are trying to disguise it as part of the (noble) effort of trying to make access to information egalitarian.
- vharuck 7y agoTo play an advocate from a deeper level of Hell: Why should the ideas in fiction be dismissed as uninformative?
- nemo 7y agoLibrarians are trying to make available materials that their reading communities want. Their bias towards entertainment media is a reflection of librarians doing their job of providing to local communities who read and listen to a lot of fiction.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- everythingswan 7y agoFiction is quite illustrative as well. I don't know how to, or if we need to, draw the line between entertainment and education but I think that it's unfair to say that you cannot be entertained and educated at the same time. I don't know if that was your point specifically but there are undertones whenever library funding gets brought up. It's also comparable to welfare fraud. There are people who campaign against welfare because of abusers but the amount the fraud amounts to is relatively low.[1] I'm not learned enough to tell you what percentage of fraud is acceptable but I worry about us treating this the same way. I understand the campaign about how your taxes are spent but I also think we agree that this is a valuable community service, especially for people who do not have access to tools and networks like I do. A very fair point though fouric! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_fraud#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_fraud#United_States
- remotecool 7y agoIt's interesting because these expectations from consumers began with rampant illegal file sharing in the late 90s. Many people made the claim that music (and now books) cost nothing to distribute, so they should get it for free. The actual cost of creating the first copy is always ignored. I always thought it was worse than theft because at least when you steal a TV, the value of the entire product line doesn't decrease.
- 80mph 7y agoWith my local library (Santa Clara county), I've noticed that there is no requirement to revalidate my local address. After I move away, I would presumably join my new library, but I'd still have the option to log back in on my Kobo E-reader using my SCCL membership. I love Overdrive, but I think a lot of users abuse the system in this way.
- codezero 7y agothey don't seem to care. my wife went around to about four libraries in the bay area so she could get easier access to some books which may not be available immediately in Santa Clara, but are available in San Mateo. I assume this is for the reasons stated in another comment: the licensing forbids individual libraries from sharing their copies with other libraries...
- otroquecorre 7y agoPaper books are always better tha ebooks, but in terms of practicity, ebooks could make your like easier. Lightweight, storing, fonts format... But the top advantage is the fact that are water resistant.
- kilolima 7y agoI don't think that libraries should purchase ebooks anyway. The checkout model translated to a digital file is awkward and un-natural- how does one checkout a single copy of an ebook? Why can't there be an infinite number of copies? I'd rather see libraries give up ebooks entirely until there is a non DRM alternative. Libraries should not reinforce existing DRM regimes. Meanwhile, it would be great if they could function as the physical location for furthering the distribution of Free ebooks already in the public domain and helping to make these available to people, maybe by lending ebook readers instead! Imagine going to a library and checking out a cheap 2nd Feb Nook loaded with 1k of Project Gutenberg classics? Or being able to choose and load the ebooks you want at the library to a device and then taking it home?