Libraries are fighting to
preserve your right to borrow e-books
By Jessamyn West
Jessamyn West (@jessamyn) is a
librarian who lives in central Vermont. She is on the board of the Vermont
Humanities Council. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on
CNN.
(CNN)Librarians to publishers:
Please take our money. Publishers to librarians: Drop dead.
That's the upshot of Macmillan
publishing's recent decision which represents yet another insult to libraries.
For the first two months after a Macmillan book is published, a library can
only buy one copy, at a discount. After eight weeks, they can purchase
"expiring" e-book copies which need to be re-purchased after two
years or 52 lends. As publishers struggle with the continuing shake-up of their
business models, and work to find practical approaches to managing digital
content in a marketplace overwhelmingly dominated by Amazon, libraries are
being portrayed as a problem, not a solution. Libraries agree there's a problem
-- but we know it's not us.
Public libraries in the United
States purchase a lot of e-books, and circulate e-books a lot. According to the
Public Library Association, electronic material circulation in libraries has
been expanding at a rate of 30% per year; and public libraries offered over 391
million e-books to their patrons in 2017. Those library users also buy books;
over 60% of frequent library users have also bought a book written by an author
they first discovered in a library, according to Pew. Libraries offer free
display space for books in over 16,000 locations nationwide. Even Macmillan
admitsthat "Library reads are currently 45% of our total digital book
reads." But instead of finding a way to work with libraries on an
equitable win-win solution, Macmillan implemented a new and confusing model and
blamed libraries for being successful at encouraging people to read their books.
Libraries don't just pay full price for
e-books -- we pay more than full price. We don't just buy one book -- in most
cases, we buy a lot of books, trying to keep hold lists down to reasonable
numbers. We accept renewable purchasing agreements and limits on e-book
lending, specifically because we understand that publishing is a business, and
that there is value in authors and publishers getting paid for their work. At
the same time, most of us are constrained by budgeting rules and high levels of
reporting transparency about where your money goes. So, we want the terms to be
fair, and we'd prefer a system that wasn't convoluted.
With print materials, book
economics are simple. Once a library buys a book, it can do whatever it wants
with it: lend it, sell it, give it away, loan it to another library so they can
lend it. We're much more restricted when it comes to e-books. To a patron, an
e-book and a print book feel like similar things, just in different formats; to
a library they're very different products. There's no inter-library loan for
e-books. When an e-book is no longer circulating, we can't sell it at a book
sale. When you're spending the public's money, these differences matter.
Library users know that you can
make a copy of a digital file essentially for free. So when we tell them,
"Sorry, there is only one copy of that e-book, and a waitlist of over 200
people," they ask the completely reasonable question, "Why?" In
Macmillan's ideal world, that library patron would get frustrated with the
library and go purchase the e-book instead. And maybe some people will do that.
In the library's ideal world, we'd be able to buy more copies of the book, and
even agree to short-term contracts, if it meant that more people had access to
the books they wanted to read, when they wanted to read them. This was not an
option on the table.
Macmillan did not at all enjoy it
when Amazon removed the "Buy" button from their titles, and yet this
is what they are trying to do to libraries.
Macmillan, complaining that
libraries were "cannibalizing" their sales, tried to spin this move
as one that "ensure[s] that the mission of libraries is supported."
But our mission is not supported by having to spend staff time and energy on
complex per-publisher agreements that inhibit our users' access to the content
they want -- content that we are willing to pay for.
Their solution isn't just
unsupportive, it doesn't even make sense. Allowing a library like the Los
Angeles Public Library (which serves 18 million people) the same number of
initial e-book copies as a rural Vermont library serving 1,200 people smacks of
punishment, not support. And Macmillan's statement, saying that people can just
borrow e-books from any library, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how
public libraries work. Macmillan isn't the first of the "big five"
publishers to try to tweak their library sales model to try to recoup more
revenue, but they are the first to accuse libraries of being a problem for them
and not a partner.
Steve Potash, the CEO of e-book
digital distributor OverDrive, came out with a statement saying "publishers
and authors are best served by offering multiple, flexible, and reasonable
terms for libraries and schools to lend digital content." OverDrive runs
the Panorama Project, a data-driven research project which researches the
impact of library holdings on, among other things, book sales. He offered some
actual data on Macmillan's claims, and painted a different picture.
The American Library Association
has denounced this model using strong language, but perhaps it's time for
libraries to do more than grumpily go along with whatever gets foisted upon us.
Sixty-four percent of US public libraries are members of consortia for e-book
purchasing. Maybe it's time we got together and decided to spend more of the
public's money with businesses who want to do business with us, who don't just
consider us "a thorny problem," while also not understanding how we
operate.
Lowering barriers to access to
information for all Americans is a public good. Public libraries exist in large
part because they are necessary to a functioning democracy. People who
participate in civics and elect their own legislators require free access to
impartial information so that they can stay informed. Creating barriers to that
access -- barriers that disproportionately affect those who are hardest to
serve -- is a short-sighted move, and highlights the very real conflicts
between capitalism and community.
