13 ms·

Publishers worry as ebooks fly off libraries' virtual shelves

106 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

matthewmcg 6y ago
This has been a godsend for us with a young reader that loves series books (Boxcar Children and the like) and our library closed for in person visits. There are literally hundreds of titles in some of these series, so she can pretty much always find one to read or re-read, even if most of them are checked out. I would dispute that this hurts sales—at least for us. The long hold times and 2-week checkout limit mean that I’ll often buy the ebook to complete it or read it without waiting in the queue.
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  Man, I lived for the Boxcar Children books when I was a kid. We had a few at home, and when I discovered that my library had the whole series, I maxed out my card with 20 or 30 books each week until I'd read them all.
adventured 6y ago
I'm surprised I rarely see concern for virtual book sharing killing off the vast US public library system that has so far - and rather remarkably - successfully survived the mass use of the Internet and rise of Amazon's Kindle. That public library system is a national treasure and needs to be protected. If virtual book sharing becomes very common online, the majority of public libraries will die. It'll consolidate down to a smaller number of large public libraries that do the lending. Even if just half of small public libraries close, it'll be an enormous cultural tragedy. It's common for small towns and cities in the US to have public libraries, they're invaluable resources and part of our national heritage. I'd rather not see our national public book stock and access relegated to further intense centralization. I grew up in a smaller town in Appalachia, we had a great public library and we were fortunate to have it. It was on the larger side and mostly well run. Everyone used it, everyone had a library card as a rite of passage. It also had community value far beyond the book utility value. (I use the past tense for my own experience, however it's still a fully operational library)
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  > If virtual book sharing becomes very common online, the majority of public libraries will die. As long as their mission is allowed to change with the times, I don't see this as an inevitability. Supposedly my local public library has seen usage of library resources continue to increase even as people check out fewer physical books. My cousin, who is a librarian for a different city, reports the same thing - at least pre-pandemic, her library was busier than ever.
- smogcutter 6y ago
  100%. I’ve also noticed libraries branching into other services that fit their mission. The library in Glendale, CA, for example, has a maker space with a publicly accessible 3d printer. Things like that, that are educational, and have public value but a high capital cost of entry for individuals, are a great fit for libraries. There are even libraries where you can check out hand tools and the like.
Mindless2112 6y ago
I'm more concerned for the libraries. They lose their ebooks after 2 years or 26/52 checkouts? Physical books can last for decades and innumerable checkouts if you have respectful patrons -- long enough that libraries eventually sell off old books to get shelf space for new ones.
- thomaslangston 6y ago
  Do you have a reference for that? My previous experience working at a library and a brief web search leads me to believe 26 checkouts is significantly above average for a hardback lifespan.
  - Mindless2112 6y ago
    I don't have any statistics on physical books, but anecdotally the physical books I check out from the library happen to be much older than 2 years and still in good condition -- perhaps survivorship bias combined with my preference in books. For ebooks there's this: > Macmillan’s claim of only making $1.15 per book is incredibly misleading, Potash argued. “Seventy-nine percent expired and were removed from library catalogs because the two-year limit occurred first—not because they were checked out 52 times,” he said. In reality, the average is about 11.5 lends. According to Potash, the cost to the library is $6.07 every time someone borrows a Macmillan book.[1] [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa78wv/one-of-americas-largest-publishers-is-screwing-over-libraries https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa78wv/one-of-americas-large...
  - jandrese 6y ago
    I don't know about today, but judging from the old checkout cards my library used to use when I was a kid books could be checked out quite a bit more than 26 times. The average would be quite a bit lower because many books are only rarely checked out. One thing I dislike about library ebooks is how thin the selection is. It should be trivial for the publisher to offer every ebook ever published. It's insane that they felt the need to port the concept of scarcity to the digital world. ebooks should have something like the compulsory licensing system used for songs.
- 6y ago
_fs 6y ago
In the last few months, me and my family have taken advantage of both Libby, for primarily audiobooks, and Hoopla, for children's books. Both were available through my library. To increase my ability to get books, I even registered for library accounts in several metropolitan districts near my house, and Libby is happy to accommodate, letting me place holds across multiple library systems. Before I never really liked reading childrens books on my Ipad, but with cool features like read along, me and the kids have been enjoying 1-2 rentals a night.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  Similar experience for me with Kanopy, which automatically combines my 10 movies per month from two different counties I have library cards in to let me watch 20.
clankyclanker 6y ago
Can we stop with the “access to copies for which the publisher is being paid less per access kills markets” shtick already? It’s been twenty plus years since Napster and the only sourced data I’ve seen, that isn’t simply publishers’ hypothetical handwringing, says that exposure creates desire and increases the size of the purchase market over a several year span. Tech dirt had a few stories, iirc.
- space_fountain 6y ago
  Isn't the market for music still way below what it was before Napster? Lots of sources but this one has a good graph: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
  - NegativeLatency 6y ago
    Causation is not established by that chart, I suspect some of the decline was due to piracy, but with no evidence it seems like it could be attributed to other factors. For example there's a drop in vinyl in the late 70's on the chart, at which time napster wasn't a thing.
    - lstodd 6y ago
      Late 70s would be the compact cassette rise.
  - seg_lol 6y ago
    This only measures revenues. Are people listening to more, less or the same amount (quantity, diversity, songs, albums, etc) of music? Listener behaviors have changed, to only cite revenue for the industry (already a subset of all music sources) is unscientific. Video killed something, what killed video and why? I am going to go out on a limb here and conjecture that the vast majority of people do not listen to music, or listen to much less music than in the past, same thing goes for books. Both industries make the majority of their profits off a small and shrinking segment of the population. Hit singles are cheap, easy and plentiful to source from anywhere, both paid and free. If the industry just makes hits, they won't have the breadth to support a diverse revenue base. You can't survive on icing alone.
Aerroon 6y ago
This just seems like a bizarre worry to me. I wonder whether these kinds of lending schemes might not have kept piracy at bay when it comes to digital books. Obviously piracy exists, but it appears to be much less common than in other forms of media. Worrying about people legally borrowing books seems like a much smaller worry.
dmitriid 6y ago
Anywhere there's content involved, there will be publishers, and distributors, and rights holders which will do anything they perceive is good for them, and them only. This goes for books, music, video etc. Make content available worldwide? No. Make content accessible on multiple platforms? No. Make digital content that doesn't involve multiple layers of logistics, resellers, stores etc. cheaper? No. Make content available through subscriptions? No. Make content available through shared account? No. As gifts? No. But you, the consumer, are the bad guy for wanting this and for not giving them every last dime you own, multiple times over. Oh, the companies that facilitate this for consumers (subscription streaming services) are also the bad guy.
- xvilka 6y ago
  They will not leave the host willingly like parasites - corresponding therapy should be done, otherwise they will continue to feed off the authors and readers until the end of times.
jawns 6y ago
I'm an author whose books are published by one of the publishers mentioned in the article, and I'm also a library patron who has checked out an absurd number of ebooks from my library since the pandemic started. The way ebooks are licensed to libraries does not seem like it is going to be sustainable. Yet copyright law lags here. My own opinion is that Controlled Digital Lending should become the norm, because it closely mirrors the way we already deal with lended print materials. I know the Author's Guild and most of the major publishers oppose CDL because they see it as a threat to their profits, but I feel more optimistic. We already know that the lending model for print works just fine, and I see it as no more than a threat than that. It may be the case that a hybrid model is possible, where libraries can either purchase an ebook at full price and practice CDL, or license it if that's more cost-effective. Chances are that licensing will still make sense for all but the most in-demand works.
- jandrese 6y ago
  It's lucky we have a public library system at all. If it wasn't grandfathered in and someone suggested it today there is no chance in hell that it would fly. Profit maximization is the only thing publishers care about, and public institutions aren't going to stand up for the public interest.
  - esperent 6y ago
    On the other hand, book are simply not as important as they were when libraries were created. Now we have multiple free, high-quality sources of information that are far easier to access than libraries ever were, for example, Wikipedia or the many sites where people share their literary works for free. This is not an attempt to belittle books or libraries - both are still important resources. They are simply not the only show in town anymore, so if they weren't grandfathered in and someone tried to create libraries today, there would be obvious arguments against doing so, besides pure profit.
    - chmod775 6y ago
      (Some) libraries are to books what archive.org is to the internet. I also don't think you realize how lacking the the digitization and public availability of older publications and books in academia is. You can count yourself lucky if there's at least a barely legible and badly scanned PDF. Usually your only choice is hitting your universities' library. This is also true for a lot of general literature that is just old enough to still be copyrighted but already too old to still be sold anywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of such books which you will be hard pressed to find anywhere but in a library. An example I recently encountered would be most works by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon. Out of his 80 published works maybe 10-20 are still easily accessible and purchasable somewhere. Soon he would be a forgotten author, and stupidly long copyright terms would have played a role in that. Thank god we have libraries preserving at least some of our history.
pessimizer 6y ago
They should worry. They were an industry that sold ornately decorated paper, and libraries were community or charitably organized warehouses of that paper kept available for people to examine for a time, then return. Now, like the music industry, the publishing industry are solely marketing and litigation organizations. Libraries don't even need books anymore, they can just become a quiet place to study that offers professionals who are experts at research who can help you find the digital things you want to study. There is still a need for editors and digital typesetters, but lets not pretend that there is a huge need for publishers, i.e. the organizations that print and distribute paper books. There's still some need, and for people who want to earn an honest living, I'm still in the market for paper reference books. It's quicker for me to look up things in a paper book. I also like a nice annotated guide for an outdoor event or large facility. The preservation and digitization of books is an important job. It's necessary to have paper masters in case all the digital versions get deleted, or corrupted. I'm also a little less hostile to copyright when referring to marks on paper, because it takes an investment to create the infrastructure to produce paper goods, which puts a publisher at risk. I'm honestly unconcerned and think society should also be unconcerned with protecting the investment you made to attract a particular author to your publishing house, and to convince people that author was worth reading. Whether that author publishes with you or another publisher, or self-publishes, is not something that society should concern itself with. Scientific publishers aren't the only bad publisher. All publishers in the age of the internet are engaged in artificially recreating the difficulties previously inherent to the distribution of ideas, so they can remain the mediators and the controllers of the scarcity of those ideas. If human society is a large composite mind, transmitting information from node to node, they are Alzheimer's disease. Anyway, publishers hated libraries before digital books, just like they hated used bookstores. All businesses hate competition. If a significant number of people started writing and publishing high-quality literature for free, they would organize to either destroy those works or find a way to tax or control their distribution, just like proprietary software and FOSS.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Who do you think is going to create all the content you want to read? The number of people willing to put the amount of time and effort required into writing a book without a profit motive is very low. The outcome is going to be the same. Except instead of having your access to copyrighted material restricted, it simply won’t exist.
zizee 6y ago
If I were a publisher, I'd be more worried about how easy it is to download ebooks from illegitimate sources. A novel usually takes up less than a few hundred kb and can be obtained in seconds.
sixtyfourbits 6y ago
Wait till they find out about library genesis...
gnicholas 6y ago
> The Libby app, a slick and easy-to-use service from the company OverDrive, gave her access to millions of titles. Am I the only person who finds that there may be "millions of titles", but rarely is the one I'm searching for one of them? The most frustrating thing is when it autocompletes the title as I'm typing it, and then it says there are zero copies anywhere in my system (San Mateo County Public Libraries). Not zero copies currently available — they don't stock the book at all, anywhere. This happens 90+ percent of the time when I do a search.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Same. It’s a fine system if you want to read a lot of things, but if you want to read a specific thing, I’ve found I was 30th in line, shrugged, and bought the book instead. This is part of how we know the worry isn’t really justified.
- silveroriole 6y ago
  Yeah, mine will show an entire section for Scottish romance novels (huh??) but won’t have the classic title I’m searching for. Internet Archive almost always has at least one copy of what I’m looking for, so I don’t bother with Libby much (although I’m aware using IA is more controversial)
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    I once spoke to an executive from OverDrive, who told me that romance novels are their bread and butter.
haltingproblem 6y ago
Thanks OP and HN :) since I have been wanting to ask this question for a long time: What stops a library from buying a physical book, scanning and digitizing it, sticking the physical book in a vault, and then making the book available via a e-lending system that ensures only one copy is checked out? Libraries can also share the digitized version with other libraries who have bought physical books. To go one step further, what stops a bunch of libraries from pooling their digitized collections together and making it available to sister libraries. I think there is nothing in current law that stops it or is there? What in the law allows e-book publishers to make distinction between physical copies of books owned by libraries and digital books? Seems to me like they are holding libraries hostage over a barrel because they can.
- sjy 6y ago
  The starting point is that scanning a book and making it available to somebody else involves copying the book, and therefore infringes copyright unless you have the copyright holder’s permission or a fair use justification. In contrast, lending a physical book does not result in a copy being created. The e-lending system you have proposed is essentially what the Internet Archive calls “controlled digital lending.” The publishers say it is copyright infringement [1]; the Internet Archive says it is analogous to traditional library lending and falls under fair use [2]. The case hasn’t gone to trial yet. [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900... [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.33.0.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900...
  - haltingproblem 6y ago
    Thank You for the links. Does what Google books have done and their work with Haathi Trust (https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/) fall in the same category? I thought this was tested in courts with respect to books. There is analogous case law backing up music CDs, won't that hold?
- dafoex 6y ago
topkai22 6y ago
I'm a little surprised that there isn't a "buy to own" option in my library's ereader. While I would certainly worry about the perverse incentives that such a feature would create (such as reducing checkout times to maximize the chance someone starts but doesn't finish a book), it seems like a win-win-win: publishers can get sales via libraries, libraries can get a cut of any revenue or lower costs, and users can keep reading the book with page location and metadata intact.
topkai22 6y ago
I stepped up my use of my library's ereader app (the same Libby mentioned in the article) during covid and was shocked that there weren't any public domain books available. That seems like table stakes for a public library's e-book program, but i guess the app and support ecosystem isn't their. Would make a great side-project for anyone interested.
- sjy 6y ago
  What would the side project consist of? A huge range of public domain books have been accessible on gutenberg.org and archive.org for many years now, in standard formats that you can use on any device without installing a proprietary “library app.”
  - topkai22 6y ago
    Sure, and I use them. However, I went to library systems for the last the counties I’ve lived in and none of them present Gutenberg or associated projects as an options when I looked for eBooks. I think I know why- the process of getting a Gutenberg book working on iOS is surprisingly difficult (multiple steps requiring a priori knowledge) and, more importantly for this conversation, my library is totally cut out of the loop and loses its relationship with me. That matters to them for funding purposes (politicians love to see higher utilization and lower costs per loan.) It matters to me because my library isn’t able to add any value to the experience by, for example, recommending great public domain kids books because they don’t have a channel to deliver them to me. While the bones of what I’d like to see does appear to exist- an eReader app that puts a better layer over free ePubs. However, it excludes the libraries. I think libraries can add value with organization, recommendations and reading lists, and a good app could provide cross device sync and history (like kindle).
aaron695 6y ago
The physicality of a library is an important part. I'd be worried about libraries. They will just turn into a ephemeral place to get free books rather than the PirateBay. It's a cultural loss turning them into something that just saves money.

106 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

This has been a godsend for us with a young reader that loves series books (Boxcar Children and the like) and our library closed for in person visits. There are literally hundreds of titles in some of these series, so she can pretty much always find one to read or re-read, even if most of them are checked out. I would dispute that this hurts sales—at least for us. The long hold times and 2-week checkout limit mean that I’ll often buy the ebook to complete it or read it without waiting in the queue.

frosted-flakes 6y ago
Man, I lived for the Boxcar Children books when I was a kid. We had a few at home, and when I discovered that my library had the whole series, I maxed out my card with 20 or 30 books each week until I'd read them all.

adventured 6y ago

I'm surprised I rarely see concern for virtual book sharing killing off the vast US public library system that has so far - and rather remarkably - successfully survived the mass use of the Internet and rise of Amazon's Kindle. That public library system is a national treasure and needs to be protected. If virtual book sharing becomes very common online, the majority of public libraries will die. It'll consolidate down to a smaller number of large public libraries that do the lending. Even if just half of small public libraries close, it'll be an enormous cultural tragedy. It's common for small towns and cities in the US to have public libraries, they're invaluable resources and part of our national heritage. I'd rather not see our national public book stock and access relegated to further intense centralization. I grew up in a smaller town in Appalachia, we had a great public library and we were fortunate to have it. It was on the larger side and mostly well run. Everyone used it, everyone had a library card as a rite of passage. It also had community value far beyond the book utility value. (I use the past tense for my own experience, however it's still a fully operational library)

mumblemumble 6y ago
> If virtual book sharing becomes very common online, the majority of public libraries will die. As long as their mission is allowed to change with the times, I don't see this as an inevitability. Supposedly my local public library has seen usage of library resources continue to increase even as people check out fewer physical books. My cousin, who is a librarian for a different city, reports the same thing - at least pre-pandemic, her library was busier than ever.
smogcutter 6y ago
100%. I’ve also noticed libraries branching into other services that fit their mission. The library in Glendale, CA, for example, has a maker space with a publicly accessible 3d printer. Things like that, that are educational, and have public value but a high capital cost of entry for individuals, are a great fit for libraries. There are even libraries where you can check out hand tools and the like.

Mindless2112 6y ago

I'm more concerned for the libraries. They lose their ebooks after 2 years or 26/52 checkouts? Physical books can last for decades and innumerable checkouts if you have respectful patrons -- long enough that libraries eventually sell off old books to get shelf space for new ones.

thomaslangston 6y ago
Do you have a reference for that? My previous experience working at a library and a brief web search leads me to believe 26 checkouts is significantly above average for a hardback lifespan.
- Mindless2112 6y ago
  I don't have any statistics on physical books, but anecdotally the physical books I check out from the library happen to be much older than 2 years and still in good condition -- perhaps survivorship bias combined with my preference in books. For ebooks there's this: > Macmillan’s claim of only making $1.15 per book is incredibly misleading, Potash argued. “Seventy-nine percent expired and were removed from library catalogs because the two-year limit occurred first—not because they were checked out 52 times,” he said. In reality, the average is about 11.5 lends. According to Potash, the cost to the library is $6.07 every time someone borrows a Macmillan book.[1] [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa78wv/one-of-americas-largest-publishers-is-screwing-over-libraries https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa78wv/one-of-americas-large...
- jandrese 6y ago
  I don't know about today, but judging from the old checkout cards my library used to use when I was a kid books could be checked out quite a bit more than 26 times. The average would be quite a bit lower because many books are only rarely checked out. One thing I dislike about library ebooks is how thin the selection is. It should be trivial for the publisher to offer every ebook ever published. It's insane that they felt the need to port the concept of scarcity to the digital world. ebooks should have something like the compulsory licensing system used for songs.
6y ago

_fs 6y ago

In the last few months, me and my family have taken advantage of both Libby, for primarily audiobooks, and Hoopla, for children's books. Both were available through my library. To increase my ability to get books, I even registered for library accounts in several metropolitan districts near my house, and Libby is happy to accommodate, letting me place holds across multiple library systems. Before I never really liked reading childrens books on my Ipad, but with cool features like read along, me and the kids have been enjoying 1-2 rentals a night.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Similar experience for me with Kanopy, which automatically combines my 10 movies per month from two different counties I have library cards in to let me watch 20.

clankyclanker 6y ago

Can we stop with the “access to copies for which the publisher is being paid less per access kills markets” shtick already? It’s been twenty plus years since Napster and the only sourced data I’ve seen, that isn’t simply publishers’ hypothetical handwringing, says that exposure creates desire and increases the size of the purchase market over a several year span. Tech dirt had a few stories, iirc.

space_fountain 6y ago
Isn't the market for music still way below what it was before Napster? Lots of sources but this one has a good graph: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  Causation is not established by that chart, I suspect some of the decline was due to piracy, but with no evidence it seems like it could be attributed to other factors. For example there's a drop in vinyl in the late 70's on the chart, at which time napster wasn't a thing.
  - lstodd 6y ago
    Late 70s would be the compact cassette rise.
- seg_lol 6y ago
  This only measures revenues. Are people listening to more, less or the same amount (quantity, diversity, songs, albums, etc) of music? Listener behaviors have changed, to only cite revenue for the industry (already a subset of all music sources) is unscientific. Video killed something, what killed video and why? I am going to go out on a limb here and conjecture that the vast majority of people do not listen to music, or listen to much less music than in the past, same thing goes for books. Both industries make the majority of their profits off a small and shrinking segment of the population. Hit singles are cheap, easy and plentiful to source from anywhere, both paid and free. If the industry just makes hits, they won't have the breadth to support a diverse revenue base. You can't survive on icing alone.

Aerroon 6y ago

This just seems like a bizarre worry to me. I wonder whether these kinds of lending schemes might not have kept piracy at bay when it comes to digital books. Obviously piracy exists, but it appears to be much less common than in other forms of media. Worrying about people legally borrowing books seems like a much smaller worry.

dmitriid 6y ago

Anywhere there's content involved, there will be publishers, and distributors, and rights holders which will do anything they perceive is good for them, and them only. This goes for books, music, video etc. Make content available worldwide? No. Make content accessible on multiple platforms? No. Make digital content that doesn't involve multiple layers of logistics, resellers, stores etc. cheaper? No. Make content available through subscriptions? No. Make content available through shared account? No. As gifts? No. But you, the consumer, are the bad guy for wanting this and for not giving them every last dime you own, multiple times over. Oh, the companies that facilitate this for consumers (subscription streaming services) are also the bad guy.

xvilka 6y ago
They will not leave the host willingly like parasites - corresponding therapy should be done, otherwise they will continue to feed off the authors and readers until the end of times.

jawns 6y ago

I'm an author whose books are published by one of the publishers mentioned in the article, and I'm also a library patron who has checked out an absurd number of ebooks from my library since the pandemic started. The way ebooks are licensed to libraries does not seem like it is going to be sustainable. Yet copyright law lags here. My own opinion is that Controlled Digital Lending should become the norm, because it closely mirrors the way we already deal with lended print materials. I know the Author's Guild and most of the major publishers oppose CDL because they see it as a threat to their profits, but I feel more optimistic. We already know that the lending model for print works just fine, and I see it as no more than a threat than that. It may be the case that a hybrid model is possible, where libraries can either purchase an ebook at full price and practice CDL, or license it if that's more cost-effective. Chances are that licensing will still make sense for all but the most in-demand works.

jandrese 6y ago
It's lucky we have a public library system at all. If it wasn't grandfathered in and someone suggested it today there is no chance in hell that it would fly. Profit maximization is the only thing publishers care about, and public institutions aren't going to stand up for the public interest.
- esperent 6y ago
  On the other hand, book are simply not as important as they were when libraries were created. Now we have multiple free, high-quality sources of information that are far easier to access than libraries ever were, for example, Wikipedia or the many sites where people share their literary works for free. This is not an attempt to belittle books or libraries - both are still important resources. They are simply not the only show in town anymore, so if they weren't grandfathered in and someone tried to create libraries today, there would be obvious arguments against doing so, besides pure profit.
  - chmod775 6y ago
    (Some) libraries are to books what archive.org is to the internet. I also don't think you realize how lacking the the digitization and public availability of older publications and books in academia is. You can count yourself lucky if there's at least a barely legible and badly scanned PDF. Usually your only choice is hitting your universities' library. This is also true for a lot of general literature that is just old enough to still be copyrighted but already too old to still be sold anywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of such books which you will be hard pressed to find anywhere but in a library. An example I recently encountered would be most works by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon. Out of his 80 published works maybe 10-20 are still easily accessible and purchasable somewhere. Soon he would be a forgotten author, and stupidly long copyright terms would have played a role in that. Thank god we have libraries preserving at least some of our history.

pessimizer 6y ago

They should worry. They were an industry that sold ornately decorated paper, and libraries were community or charitably organized warehouses of that paper kept available for people to examine for a time, then return. Now, like the music industry, the publishing industry are solely marketing and litigation organizations. Libraries don't even need books anymore, they can just become a quiet place to study that offers professionals who are experts at research who can help you find the digital things you want to study. There is still a need for editors and digital typesetters, but lets not pretend that there is a huge need for publishers, i.e. the organizations that print and distribute paper books. There's still some need, and for people who want to earn an honest living, I'm still in the market for paper reference books. It's quicker for me to look up things in a paper book. I also like a nice annotated guide for an outdoor event or large facility. The preservation and digitization of books is an important job. It's necessary to have paper masters in case all the digital versions get deleted, or corrupted. I'm also a little less hostile to copyright when referring to marks on paper, because it takes an investment to create the infrastructure to produce paper goods, which puts a publisher at risk. I'm honestly unconcerned and think society should also be unconcerned with protecting the investment you made to attract a particular author to your publishing house, and to convince people that author was worth reading. Whether that author publishes with you or another publisher, or self-publishes, is not something that society should concern itself with. Scientific publishers aren't the only bad publisher. All publishers in the age of the internet are engaged in artificially recreating the difficulties previously inherent to the distribution of ideas, so they can remain the mediators and the controllers of the scarcity of those ideas. If human society is a large composite mind, transmitting information from node to node, they are Alzheimer's disease. Anyway, publishers hated libraries before digital books, just like they hated used bookstores. All businesses hate competition. If a significant number of people started writing and publishing high-quality literature for free, they would organize to either destroy those works or find a way to tax or control their distribution, just like proprietary software and FOSS.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
Who do you think is going to create all the content you want to read? The number of people willing to put the amount of time and effort required into writing a book without a profit motive is very low. The outcome is going to be the same. Except instead of having your access to copyrighted material restricted, it simply won’t exist.

zizee 6y ago

If I were a publisher, I'd be more worried about how easy it is to download ebooks from illegitimate sources. A novel usually takes up less than a few hundred kb and can be obtained in seconds.

sixtyfourbits 6y ago

Wait till they find out about library genesis...

gnicholas 6y ago

> The Libby app, a slick and easy-to-use service from the company OverDrive, gave her access to millions of titles. Am I the only person who finds that there may be "millions of titles", but rarely is the one I'm searching for one of them? The most frustrating thing is when it autocompletes the title as I'm typing it, and then it says there are zero copies anywhere in my system (San Mateo County Public Libraries). Not zero copies currently available — they don't stock the book at all, anywhere. This happens 90+ percent of the time when I do a search.

coffeefirst 6y ago
Same. It’s a fine system if you want to read a lot of things, but if you want to read a specific thing, I’ve found I was 30th in line, shrugged, and bought the book instead. This is part of how we know the worry isn’t really justified.
silveroriole 6y ago
Yeah, mine will show an entire section for Scottish romance novels (huh??) but won’t have the classic title I’m searching for. Internet Archive almost always has at least one copy of what I’m looking for, so I don’t bother with Libby much (although I’m aware using IA is more controversial)
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I once spoke to an executive from OverDrive, who told me that romance novels are their bread and butter.

haltingproblem 6y ago

Thanks OP and HN :) since I have been wanting to ask this question for a long time: What stops a library from buying a physical book, scanning and digitizing it, sticking the physical book in a vault, and then making the book available via a e-lending system that ensures only one copy is checked out? Libraries can also share the digitized version with other libraries who have bought physical books. To go one step further, what stops a bunch of libraries from pooling their digitized collections together and making it available to sister libraries. I think there is nothing in current law that stops it or is there? What in the law allows e-book publishers to make distinction between physical copies of books owned by libraries and digital books? Seems to me like they are holding libraries hostage over a barrel because they can.

sjy 6y ago
The starting point is that scanning a book and making it available to somebody else involves copying the book, and therefore infringes copyright unless you have the copyright holder’s permission or a fair use justification. In contrast, lending a physical book does not result in a copy being created. The e-lending system you have proposed is essentially what the Internet Archive calls “controlled digital lending.” The publishers say it is copyright infringement [1]; the Internet Archive says it is analogous to traditional library lending and falls under fair use [2]. The case hasn’t gone to trial yet. [1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.1.0.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900... [2] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.33.0.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900...
- haltingproblem 6y ago
  Thank You for the links. Does what Google books have done and their work with Haathi Trust (https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/) fall in the same category? I thought this was tested in courts with respect to books. There is analogous case law backing up music CDs, won't that hold?
dafoex 6y ago

topkai22 6y ago

I'm a little surprised that there isn't a "buy to own" option in my library's ereader. While I would certainly worry about the perverse incentives that such a feature would create (such as reducing checkout times to maximize the chance someone starts but doesn't finish a book), it seems like a win-win-win: publishers can get sales via libraries, libraries can get a cut of any revenue or lower costs, and users can keep reading the book with page location and metadata intact.

topkai22 6y ago

I stepped up my use of my library's ereader app (the same Libby mentioned in the article) during covid and was shocked that there weren't any public domain books available. That seems like table stakes for a public library's e-book program, but i guess the app and support ecosystem isn't their. Would make a great side-project for anyone interested.

sjy 6y ago
What would the side project consist of? A huge range of public domain books have been accessible on gutenberg.org and archive.org for many years now, in standard formats that you can use on any device without installing a proprietary “library app.”
- topkai22 6y ago
  Sure, and I use them. However, I went to library systems for the last the counties I’ve lived in and none of them present Gutenberg or associated projects as an options when I looked for eBooks. I think I know why- the process of getting a Gutenberg book working on iOS is surprisingly difficult (multiple steps requiring a priori knowledge) and, more importantly for this conversation, my library is totally cut out of the loop and loses its relationship with me. That matters to them for funding purposes (politicians love to see higher utilization and lower costs per loan.) It matters to me because my library isn’t able to add any value to the experience by, for example, recommending great public domain kids books because they don’t have a channel to deliver them to me. While the bones of what I’d like to see does appear to exist- an eReader app that puts a better layer over free ePubs. However, it excludes the libraries. I think libraries can add value with organization, recommendations and reading lists, and a good app could provide cross device sync and history (like kindle).

aaron695 6y ago

The physicality of a library is an important part. I'd be worried about libraries. They will just turn into a ephemeral place to get free books rather than the PirateBay. It's a cultural loss turning them into something that just saves money.