Good article in The Scholarly Kitchen by Kent Anderson, CEO/Publisher of the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. Here’s an excerpt:
Abundance creates one of the perceptual challenges for all involved — the perception that electronic resources are much cheaper and more abundant than physical items. In the age of scarcity, a publisher could sell one copy of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” to a local library, and patrons would have understood what they’re competing for — a definite physical object that isn’t at the library when it’s checked out. Allow three e-book copies to be on deposit, and suddenly waiting for a copy seems odd. Out of the frustration this creates, pirating a copy seems a rational response. …
Attempting to live life the way they’ve always lived it — by preserving check-outs, throttling supply, and creating queues for e-books — publishers and libraries are only cementing their place in the past. One idea toward a different outcome? Perhaps instead of a library simply telling a patron that a book isn’t available, work with Amazon to create a consignment approach. The patron could have the book on their device for a week without charge and read up to 50% of the book in that time. If the e-book is returned to the library in that time, they can pick up where they stopped and it’s all still free. If not, they can buy the book (and the library gets a percentage of the sale), or they can wait it out.
Libraries have a great potential role in marketing e-books, but if they continue to think of themselves as the preservationists of physical artifacts, the emerging e-book platforms will leapfrog them. Publishers would also find a natural alignment here.
I don’t disagree that ebooks these days are surpassing physical books although I still believe that there are still a good number of readers who are loyal to non-digital way of reading.
Mr Anderson is right – this whole attempt to preserve the process model that we have with paper is misguided and wrong.
ePublishing is different. It is not just paper in digital form. The specific case of a publisher issuing three ‘copies’ of an eBook for lending illustrates the ridiculously nonsensical nature of this.
Libraries as marketers of ebooks?! Yeegawd. Whay not just sell all libraies to Starbucks!
All my book in print are ebooks, but I do not own an ebook reader, and I use the local library a great deal for print books and audio books.
This whole thing abt ebooks taking over libraries is turning the libraries into pervues of the 1%.
“Out of the frustration this creates, pirating a copy seems a rational response. …”
Talk about an entitled!
This is literally saying that either the publishers and/or libraries should give out a free copy of every book they make to everyone, or otherwise people have the right to steal it.
Oh, wait, it’s not saying they should give it away to everyone, just those who can afford to purchase Amazon’s proprietary hardware, which is still more expensive than almost any actual book.
People who currently can’t afford to buy books, and thus NEED a public library in the first place, can presumably either scrape together their savings for a Kindle, or go illiterate.
Why don’t we just admit that ereader owners can afford to go ahead and pay a couple bucks for something they enjoy?
Unless Kindle fans can adopt a more mature attitude. I have a hard time seeing why publisher’s shouldn’t just put viruses on the pirate sites, then charge for the anti-virus!
I have great difficulty believing any library user doesn’t understand that the library buys a certain number of copies of a book, whether physical or digital, and can only lend that number at any one time. The idea that library patrons don’t understand that limitation is insulting. However, the idea that people use that or anything else as an excuse to pirate is simply a sad, but undoubtedly true, reflection of the modern attitude of entitlement pervasive everywhere.
The idea of libraries providing only part of a book and maybe the rest will be available next week or maybe the borrower should just buy it is ridiculous. No library should be an agent for a seller.
Libraries don’t “throttle” supply. They use taxpayer money to provide books to those who can’t afford or are unwilling to buy them. Having to put a book on a hold and wait a while in order to get a popular book free is not exactly an unbearable burden. I wonder if the author of this article actually uses a library? Bet not.
Ellen – I don’t really grasp your first point. I see no evidence anywhere that Mr Anderson “doesn’t understand that the library buys a certain number of copies of a book”. He seems to me to understand it perfectly. He just disagrees with it, as I do.
Your assertion that it is suggested that library users don’t “understand” the limitation is equally inaccurate by my reading. This is not even the point being made. It is that library users are frustrated by the waiting period, that is at issue. I agree with Mr Anderson fully. I have had library users express their frustration on countless occasions, throughout my life, about the issue of having to wait weeks for a book.
The factual truth is that libraries do throttle supply. That is self evidenced by the fact that they have a limited number of copies.
That this is a justifiable excuse for downloading illegal copies is clearly not the case. However Mr Anderson is simply pointing out, as I see it, that we are living in a different world now where people have become accustomed to instant access and that the old fashioned waiting period is simply no long acceptable to a growing proportion of the public. This also seems eminently evident to me from observing how people are behaving since the digitisation of music and then books..
The idea that the old library model can just carry on regardless is just silly. The whole reading experience is changing. The whole publishing system is changing. The whole model is changing fundamentally. People are not going to sit around waiting in the way that the old model expected them to do.
You may not like it. You may find the old way quaint and enjoyable, and I respect that. But it’s time is coming to an end.