This is my first day back at work after a week-long vacation in New York City.
While I was away the blogosphere and colleagues' Facebook pages were awash with the news that HarperCollins is imposing a limit of 26 on the number of checkouts that will be allowed for titles purchased by libraries and made available to patrons via the Overdrive downloadable e-book platform. As this cartoon, shared by guest blogger Justin Hoenke in this post on Tame the Web, libraries are already behind the 8-ball when it comes to offering e-books thanks to cumbersome digital rights management and technology:
The new limits on the number of checkouts will either make library e-books even more costly for libraries to offer (we'll have to re-buy popular titles once the checkout limit is reached - and e-books purchased through Overdrive already cost about 2x what a physical copy of the same book costs) or inconvenient for patrons (if libraries do not have the funds to re-purchase the item and there is still demand).
The checkout limits present a challenge for libraries like PVLD that have our own subscription to Overdrive, but they present a much greater challenge to the many public libraries who can only afford to offer the Overdrive service as participants in a consortium in which patrons of all member libraries share access to the same e-book collection creating the potential for much greater demand for each individual title.
While I understand that the publishers are scared about the shift from print to digital and what it might mean for their revenues it seems to me that making it more difficult for libraries to offer e-books is extermely shortsighted.
As author Courtney Milan so clearly articulates in this blog post on "Eating Your Seed Corn", for many people accessing books (whether print or electronic) at the library is for many people a step on the path to becoming avid readers and book purchasers when they have the means. Limiting access to e-books via the public library may protect publishers' near-term revenue at the cost of cutting out entire generations of future customers...as Courtney so eloquently puts it, in effect eating their seed corn.
It seems to me that the company most likely to be the publishing equivalent of the bookstore world's Barnes and Noble (as opposed to Borders) will make it as easy for people to access e-books at the library as it is to access library books in print (and as an aside I don't think it is a coincidence that Barnes and Noble designed their e-reader to work with library e-books).
Using library books will never be as easy or convenient as just buying books - you still have to wait your turn for in-demand titles, have access for only a limited time, etc. That's why so many avid adult readers in our community tell me that their kids use the library, and they themselves loved the library when they were younger, but now that they have jobs, family commitments and more disposible income they prefer to just buy their books. Like Courtney I wonder if they would be the book consumers that they are today if they had not had the earlier experience of using the library?
In the meantime, PVLD like all other affected libraries, will be carefully monitoring e-book usage and being even more careful about what titles we "buy" (which really means "rent" in the HarperCollins model) and will likely have to either make the most popular titles less available so that we can privde access to a broad collection to suit diverse interests or spend more money on the most popular titles so we can meet demand at the expense of collection breadth.
Difficult choices indeed.
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