Bobbie Newman, who blogs at Librarian by Day, has an excellent editorial post about current Ebook conditions in public libraries. She questions whether libraries should step back and wait for better options, quoting several other prominent bloggers on the subject. It’s an interesting thought piece from a public library perspective. The comments are just as interesting.
Here is a brief clip from the post – Should Libraries Get Out of the Ebook Business?
Or get out at least until there is a better system? I know what you are going to say, I can hear it already – “We can’t! Our patrons demand ebooks!” Except the truth is our patrons want a lot of things we can’t give them – to always be first on the waiting list for the new James Patterson, to not pay fines when their books are late, for the library to be open earlier or later, or to have a system besides Dewey because despite using it their entire lives they still cannot figure it out. When it comes to ebooks, we cannot give them what they want, not really, we cannot give them books from Simon and Schuster or MacMillian or new books from Penguin or Hatchet, and not more than 26 times from HarperCollins, and probably not many books from Random House. What we can do, what maybe we should do, is spend their tax money wisely, and I am no longer convinced that spending it on the current ebook system is a wise move.
(Via No Shelf Required.)
This attitude and message is yet another cave to the Big Six publishers and a slap in the library users – thanks for the troll-like behavior, TC and Bobbie Newman.
As usual, disappointed and appalled. Maybe the DOJ should add this to their potentional suit against the Apple/publishers action in place now…
The point of the article is that libraries and their patrons are being jerked around right now by the big six, and that maybe, since they’re spending a limited resource pool, they should step back and wait a bit for the dust to settle.
Did you even read the article? Where in that article is Bobbie Newman expressing any even vaguely troll-like opinions? She’s looking at the current landscape–in which she believes the libraries are powerless to effect any change in publisher behavior on their own–and offering some thoughts.
Thanks for sharing this with your readers!