You May Have to Wait to Borrow a New E-Book from the Library
npr.org
npr.org
Librarians complain it's too hard to find good books unless they buy them from the big publishers. Libraries even hire a company called Baker & Taylor to tell them what to buy -- B&T is a distributor that's deeply connected to big publishers and won't even handle most small publisher's books. When a small publisher tries to get library sales, usually librarians say it's too much work to evaluate their books. This doesn't of course always happen -- there are ways that small publishers can sell to libraries, but it is often too costly and difficult and I know of many small publishers who've just given up on doing business with libraries. It's a disservice to readers and authors who aren't in the big publisher system, but it's how libraries do business.
Now big publishers are starting to say, libraries are in competition with them. It's ridiculous - books become popular because of word of mouth, and libraries can be very helpful in this sort of "dandelion" marketing. So hopefully more authors will wise up and look for alternative publishing approaches. And maybe libraries will start actually looking for other sources of books, but, librarians are by and large a very traditional and hide-bound lot, especially when it comes to picking books, and probably will resist changing their approach no matter how badly the big publishers treat libraries.
I have yet to find a way out of this rabbit hole because the modern publishing world is stacked with junk now that everyone can create printed and digital content.
Finding good original non-mainstream content on the internet is difficult enough as it is. There is no DuckDuckGo for books with sensible PageRank (yet).
E-book borrowing is so good these days. I walked down to the library, they reissued my card, I punched that into Libby and picked a book and it was on my Kindle. Now I just borrow. So good.
Yes, I need to wait to read a specific book, but I don't need to wait to read something I have on my list.
I'd much rather have public libraries come to a reasonable agreement with publishers.
Perhaps the one concession I could make is to have the library provide a remote access system where you can log in and view books, but anything that manufactures digital scarcity is repugnant.
Says who? There are markets today where DRM-free content is widely available, such as recorded music. DRM-free ebooks are an interesting possibility especially for the "long tail" of content that normally would see very few sales or even go out of print entirely. We just have to make it clear that DRM-unencumbered content is valuable to us, and we expect it.
Oreilly tried selling drm free books. They gave up, and went subscription only (you can buy drm books of theirs through other services).
Manning still has drm free books (though they insert your name into each page, which is a neat trick)
Interestingly, it fails to load at all using the domain name and when I tried the IP address, I got this message:
Sorry, this page is not available through Virgin Media
Virgin Media has received an order from the High Court requiring us to prevent access to this site. For more information about the order and your rights, please click the relevant link below.
That would be enough to deter a lot of people.
As it happens I find it extremely irritating that they've ported the real world model into the digital world.
edit:
Actually, just tried another domain name and that wasn't blocked
Interesting, so the incentive seems to be to break up larger "library systems" into smaller ones? Sounds terrible.
In general, I've found the ebook selection at my library (San Mateo County Libraries) to be terrible. I can't remember the last time they had a book I wanted to get. I have done title searches many times, and they always autocomplete the name, but then there are no search results. I assume these books are available in hard copy, but they just choose not to get them in ebook format for whatever reason. Too bad, since I'm pretty much never going to check out a physical book from my library.
Of course the real answer is sci-hub and the like. Libraries have always fought the good fight for public access to information (threatening signs by the xerox [sic] machines notwithstanding), but they're chained to playing by the rules of an obsolete copyright system that gets continually worse. They will only be able to truly re-focus after larger society moves to Free copying, such that basic access is taken for granted.
Though I've got to wonder about buying paperbacks and self digitizing. Google did a decent job destroying much of that angle, but I would think there could be a little opening left if you destroyed the originals such that you were completely format shifting.
Then the same idea of one viewer at a time could be applied, with the system moving the work between devices rather than copying. If you lost your device with checked out pages on it, you'd get a library fine...
You'd probably still get hit with an eventual legal kneecapping, but it's fun to think about.
As your parent says, they're already pirating the e-book. The difference is in how it appears to the publisher. If an e-book is bought and then ripped, the publisher doesn't become aware of the latter but they still see an e-book sale.
> If it's just about being able to keep your copy forever
It's not just about that. It's also about not supporting a sale one is opposed to on principle.
I also think we have a somewhat different definition of forever.
(It’s not going to happen, btw. The existence of things like self-publishing and vanity publishers is proof that supply will continue to outstrip demand, probably forever. Economic incentives are fundamentally secondary in this particular activity.)
Not all of those guys are Hugh Howey.
"Free copying" is not a solution, it's a reality that can't - and shouldn't - be avoided.
You can monetize content a lot more effectively via "free copying" combined with crowdfunding ala Kickstarter/Patreon.
(That model only hits a potential failure case for something like movies or AAA games, where currently you can only ever hope to defray your costs if close to 100% of your audience pays up, and they're already paying "premium" prices, so they can't be reasonably expected to pay even more as a "patron"'s contribution to the creative process. But then again, that's just another way of saying "this content is unreasonably expensive - there's plenty of stuff that's vastly cheaper to create, and we should be funding that instead!")
That sounds like a big number. I don't know how much an author makes from a library borrow compared to a regular purchase, but I'd wager increased library borrowing is a net bad thing for author paychecks. So MacMillan is trying the same tactics movie studios use (I sure can't borrow a DVD from my library when the film is in theaters, let alone buy it) to throttle free access when a book's value is highest (new release). This seems reasonable to me.
1. eBooks are for copying, not borrowing.
2. So, no, you never have to wait... unless there's some artificial DRM standing in your way.