Publishers worry as ebooks fly off libraries' virtual shelves
wired.com
wired.com
The way ebooks are licensed to libraries does not seem like it is going to be sustainable. Yet copyright law lags here. My own opinion is that Controlled Digital Lending should become the norm, because it closely mirrors the way we already deal with lended print materials.
I know the Author's Guild and most of the major publishers oppose CDL because they see it as a threat to their profits, but I feel more optimistic. We already know that the lending model for print works just fine, and I see it as no more than a threat than that.
It may be the case that a hybrid model is possible, where libraries can either purchase an ebook at full price and practice CDL, or license it if that's more cost-effective. Chances are that licensing will still make sense for all but the most in-demand works.
If it wasn't grandfathered in and someone suggested it today there is no chance in hell that it would fly. Profit maximization is the only thing publishers care about, and public institutions aren't going to stand up for the public interest.
I also don't think you realize how lacking the the digitization and public availability of older publications and books in academia is. You can count yourself lucky if there's at least a barely legible and badly scanned PDF. Usually your only choice is hitting your universities' library.
This is also true for a lot of general literature that is just old enough to still be copyrighted but already too old to still be sold anywhere. There are thousands upon thousands of such books which you will be hard pressed to find anywhere but in a library. An example I recently encountered would be most works by Joseph Jefferson Farjeon. Out of his 80 published works maybe 10-20 are still easily accessible and purchasable somewhere. Soon he would be a forgotten author, and stupidly long copyright terms would have played a role in that.
Thank god we have libraries preserving at least some of our history.
It's a real book, but if you're limited to the Internet you might not even realize it exists.
Even better, try finding any version of Joaquin Miller's The Battle of Castle Crags.
I have a deep interest in magic and mentalism, and found a library here that has books on the subject that are so old they're not even in modern English (or German as is the case for some of the books they have). Luckily the illustrations are detailed and verbose.
Also in Toronto we have the Reference Library which is a gold mine, and probably is even more archive.org-like than most libraries. I honed my Assembly Language skills there in the 90's, and did enormous amounts of research on Artificial Life and that sort of thing. They have some of the best stacks, so you have to use the CueCat or whatever they call it to summon up all the good stuff they dare not leave on the shelves.
Nowadays a lot of material is available on the Internet. Yet most books are so very much better than a current blog or online "tutorial." Even the older books. So there is that.
PS: I always buy the e-books that I like. Paper copies if they're available, since I prefer them. You can tell a great book by how dog-eared it gets over time. You don't get that metric with ebooks.
You are vastly understating the problems of bitrot, linkrot, and the amount of quality information available at your local library, and are massively overstating the amount of quality information available on the internet. (And much of that quality information is gated behind proprietary walled gardens, or is monetized through adware and spyware.)
Not to mention the modern trend of burying five bits of useful information in an 8 minute video, the first two minutes of which are pointless small talk and requests to like/subscribe/follow, and the other six are an unsearchable morass that takes way too long to get to the point.
The internet does two things better - searchability, and multimedia. The rest is a hot mess of largely superficial depth, and dubious quality.
Videos are often even ~10:10 minutes long for a while already now. I think it's a monetization thing on YouTube.
If you know keywords, you can search for them using your browser's search function in the time stamped transcript that might be available from the three-dot-menu below the video.
Increasing playback speed also helps.
I often thought about some 45 to 60 minutes piece that they could have done that in 5 to 10 minutes without wasting my time.
This is an important point too. If it's something I'd like to keep for later use and on a single page, I almost inevitably print the page into a PDF (from reader mode).
I think it depends from where and when you look at it. While for someone living "out there" the online stuff is an enrichment, for someone used to live metropolitan or at least some university town, it's only so so and not really overwhelming.
The same is true for (good) book stores dealing with dead wood. The haptics are simply different. You can stroll along there and find something interesting widening your horizon by random chance/serendipity.
The recommendations from sites like Amazon or Goodreads don't offer that, even if they are trying to emulate that.
Not the same, more like tunnel vision, and if something like "surprise me!" is offered, it's different from walking into some rarely or never visited part, quickly scanning a few pages and "seeing" how it's like.
The same applies to reading "on-screen", no matter which device, size, and display technology. The haptics are mostly WORSE.
Not having experienced the good parts of "dead wood" it may be excused, because not knowing it any better. Nonetheless there were and still are many good parts about "dead wood", and the ecosystem surrounding that. Just not everywhere.
/endrant
Oh, yeah? Try finding out how to do something in Visual Basic 6 or try finding out how jeweler's used to cut accurate screw threads.
Knowledge prior to 1996 was in books. Many of those books have been discarded because they "don't circulate". I have even tried to pull some of these things via interlibrary loan programs--the books simply do not exist.
This knowledge is no longer available to someone without significant resource. It's not online; the books are gone; old periodicals may be online but are behind a paywall. You might be able to purchase one of these books if someone with an extensive personal library dies--but the book will be expensive.
As a child, I could walk into my local university library and pull car repair, machining, Popular Electronics, etc. off the shelves and simply read them. Free of charge! No library card required (even though my parents paid for one for me). This certainly contributed to what I am today.
Libraries no longer attempt to serve as a resource for the broader public. And that's a terrible, terrible loss to society.
https://www.vbtutor.net/lesson2.html
https://www.appropedia.org/Cutting_screw_threads
If you have any books and want to make them last forever, you should get them scanned and uploaded on libgen for maximum reach and robust archiving. Local libraries are a nice idea, but they can't have the same reach.
And, as for screw threads, tap and die simply aren't accurate enough for stuff like watchmaking (although with modern technology--carbide cutters, titanium materials, CNC machines, etc.--they might be).
The screw thread question wasn't hypothetical. I actually asked at a fairly big machinist's meetup how to do that on a jeweler's lathe. Nobody knew how.
The answer, it turns out, is that they would build a custom power feed. This is documented on p62-76 of "Practical Benchwork for Horologists." This is such an important concept that the book devotes more than 10% of the "Tools and their Uses" section to it and it's the only thing in the book with actual plans.
Yet nobody now knows. And I had to figure out where the answer might lie with very little guidance. And I had to buy the book blind to figure that out. I got lucky and the book was $20 (it's normally about $200) so I took a flyer (It's a wonderful look at the art of machining. As I explained to my wife why I found a nearly 100 year old book so entertaining--"It's engineering porn. You're not supposed to understand.")
I couldn't request it via interlibrary loan from any library in my purview. I couldn't find the knowledge online.
And this wasn't a terribly rare book. Sure, it wasn't a bestseller, but it went through 7 or 8 editions over about 70 years. There is zero reason for it to be gone other than the libraries threw it out.
Are you sure about that? If you're not in a super-large library with full anonymity, your librarians will definitely know when you're reading a lot of books that suggest some ideology. They may not keep a profile written down, but they definitely will remember. And they do keep a list of books you took home, at least our local library does.
Regarding new ideas: might be different in other places of the world, but public libraries over here aren't that well stocked and feel like they primarily offer what the librarians value (which will largely mirror the mainstream opinion of the general population, as they're state employees). That's different for university libraries, which do keep a more diverse collection.
That's the capitalist ideal though, there's plenty of reasons why it's not currently happening. Most publishers still seem to think they can continue pricing digital and physical books the same and turn the significant savings in printing costs into pure profit. And they might have some second thoughts about this whole 'lending books' thing.
CDL is interesting here because it is in essence a threat that failing to provide a fair digital alternative will just lead to libraries digitizing the books for themselves, and in the worst case cooperate so you can lend a copy of the book provided any (statewide, countrywide, worldwide) library still has an unlent copy.
The article addresses that. There's much less friction/effort to borrow and return a physical book, than there is to borrow and return a digital version of the same book.
So, all other things being equal, the # sales displaced by one ebook under CDL is going to be higher than that of a physical book, assuming both have the same shelf life and there are no restrictions on lending except for one-at-a-time.
This seems like a band aid solution. Like hacking old code to run on a new machine, totally disregarding why we build the new machine in the first place. I personally don't know what should be a good model for digital lending but it can be different from how we do it with physical books. This kind of band aid thinking will just cause more legacy issues in the future and may also detract from really taking advantage of the new format.
Actually can you explain why you think the licensing model will work for some books and not others? How will volume of demand impact this?
But in a typical library, most books in the catalog are checked out infrequently. It might not make financial sense to purchase those books outright. But if a library can pay a licensing fee on a per-checkout basis, then it can expand its offerings.
My previous experience working at a library and a brief web search leads me to believe 26 checkouts is significantly above average for a hardback lifespan.
For ebooks there's this:
> Macmillan’s claim of only making $1.15 per book is incredibly misleading, Potash argued. “Seventy-nine percent expired and were removed from library catalogs because the two-year limit occurred first—not because they were checked out 52 times,” he said. In reality, the average is about 11.5 lends. According to Potash, the cost to the library is $6.07 every time someone borrows a Macmillan book.[1]
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa78wv/one-of-americas-large...
One thing I dislike about library ebooks is how thin the selection is. It should be trivial for the publisher to offer every ebook ever published. It's insane that they felt the need to port the concept of scarcity to the digital world. ebooks should have something like the compulsory licensing system used for songs.
It’s been twenty plus years since Napster and the only sourced data I’ve seen, that isn’t simply publishers’ hypothetical handwringing, says that exposure creates desire and increases the size of the purchase market over a several year span. Tech dirt had a few stories, iirc.
Listener behaviors have changed, to only cite revenue for the industry (already a subset of all music sources) is unscientific. Video killed something, what killed video and why?
I am going to go out on a limb here and conjecture that the vast majority of people do not listen to music, or listen to much less music than in the past, same thing goes for books. Both industries make the majority of their profits off a small and shrinking segment of the population.
Hit singles are cheap, easy and plentiful to source from anywhere, both paid and free. If the industry just makes hits, they won't have the breadth to support a diverse revenue base. You can't survive on icing alone.
They managed to maximize their revenue when they had sole control of distribution. For most musical acts an "album" is one or two singles with a bunch of filler. Anyone wanting to buy those one or two singles had to spend $8-15 on a cassette or CD.
When iTunes et al came around making single sales widely available, we get to see how little most people cared for albums. Before iTunes most labels didn't even sell singles and when they did they were still several dollars vs the 99¢ from iTunes and the like.
Allowing consumers to actually buy what they want has been a huge improvement for them.
In my friend group, one dude downloading Into The Spiderverse led to six of us seeing it in theaters.
This is obviously anecdotal, but it's always seemed to me that piracy is almost free advertising in some cases (though obviously not universally.)
Tim O'Reilly wrote a post in 2002 titled "Piracy is Progressive Taxation"[0]. Basically, the conclusion he came to after analyzing the data is that on average, piracy stimulates demand enough for net gain in sales for publishers, but it isn't distributed evenly: works in the fat head (eg. bestsellers, blockbusters, etc.) see a very small net loss (ie. for the most popular content piracy may displace sales a bit), but for everyone else it is a net gain, and the gain is bigger the less popular the content is.
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxati...
and this is different than "paid influencers" how? oh, well I guess in the former, it's an interested fan, and in the latter it's a known commodity that likely doesn't even like what they're reading/watching.
Sure, I remember when we used to say this on Slashdot twenty years ago. But does this still hold true when films and music have moved to streaming that pays artists ridiculously little and there is no longer much interest in buying physical media among the younger generations? (Even the chance for musicians to make money from touring is gone for at least 2020–2021).
Once books go into a streaming model that allows you to read as much as you like for a low monthly cost, very few people are going to buy the physical book. So, it looks like authors will have to just be content with that fraction of a cent per read in perpetuity, and making the book practically free isn’t really creating a market by which authors can make a living from their work.
Even if a publisher does not believe in the shtick, they do not want library lending to become socially acceptable and easily accessible since it would erode the market of people who are willing and able to pay.
Another reason is that some markets are going to be more susceptible to lost revenue than others. It is possible that library lending represents a loss of revenue for popular authors who have no need of exposure or have easier access to other forms of exposure. Of course, this isn't always true. Many authors toil away in obscurity or serve niche markets, where the exposure is probably beneficial. The publishers who have popular authors have the greatest incentive to oppose library lending.
Measures are likely another issue. It is far easier to count lost sales (e.g. X% of lending) than it is to count sales from increased exposure. That X% of lending also makes it easier to calculate how much libraries should pay in order to generate similar revenues.
I would dispute that this hurts sales—at least for us. The long hold times and 2-week checkout limit mean that I’ll often buy the ebook to complete it or read it without waiting in the queue.
If virtual book sharing becomes very common online, the majority of public libraries will die. It'll consolidate down to a smaller number of large public libraries that do the lending. Even if just half of small public libraries close, it'll be an enormous cultural tragedy. It's common for small towns and cities in the US to have public libraries, they're invaluable resources and part of our national heritage. I'd rather not see our national public book stock and access relegated to further intense centralization.
I grew up in a smaller town in Appalachia, we had a great public library and we were fortunate to have it. It was on the larger side and mostly well run. Everyone used it, everyone had a library card as a rite of passage. It also had community value far beyond the book utility value. (I use the past tense for my own experience, however it's still a fully operational library)
As long as their mission is allowed to change with the times, I don't see this as an inevitability. Supposedly my local public library has seen usage of library resources continue to increase even as people check out fewer physical books. My cousin, who is a librarian for a different city, reports the same thing - at least pre-pandemic, her library was busier than ever.
Am I the only person who finds that there may be "millions of titles", but rarely is the one I'm searching for one of them?
The most frustrating thing is when it autocompletes the title as I'm typing it, and then it says there are zero copies anywhere in my system (San Mateo County Public Libraries). Not zero copies currently available — they don't stock the book at all, anywhere. This happens 90+ percent of the time when I do a search.
This is part of how we know the worry isn’t really justified.
Before I never really liked reading childrens books on my Ipad, but with cool features like read along, me and the kids have been enjoying 1-2 rentals a night.
This goes for books, music, video etc.
Make content available worldwide? No. Make content accessible on multiple platforms? No. Make digital content that doesn't involve multiple layers of logistics, resellers, stores etc. cheaper? No. Make content available through subscriptions? No. Make content available through shared account? No. As gifts? No.
But you, the consumer, are the bad guy for wanting this and for not giving them every last dime you own, multiple times over. Oh, the companies that facilitate this for consumers (subscription streaming services) are also the bad guy.
There is still a need for editors and digital typesetters, but lets not pretend that there is a huge need for publishers, i.e. the organizations that print and distribute paper books. There's still some need, and for people who want to earn an honest living, I'm still in the market for paper reference books. It's quicker for me to look up things in a paper book. I also like a nice annotated guide for an outdoor event or large facility. The preservation and digitization of books is an important job. It's necessary to have paper masters in case all the digital versions get deleted, or corrupted.
I'm also a little less hostile to copyright when referring to marks on paper, because it takes an investment to create the infrastructure to produce paper goods, which puts a publisher at risk. I'm honestly unconcerned and think society should also be unconcerned with protecting the investment you made to attract a particular author to your publishing house, and to convince people that author was worth reading. Whether that author publishes with you or another publisher, or self-publishes, is not something that society should concern itself with.
Scientific publishers aren't the only bad publisher. All publishers in the age of the internet are engaged in artificially recreating the difficulties previously inherent to the distribution of ideas, so they can remain the mediators and the controllers of the scarcity of those ideas. If human society is a large composite mind, transmitting information from node to node, they are Alzheimer's disease.
Anyway, publishers hated libraries before digital books, just like they hated used bookstores. All businesses hate competition. If a significant number of people started writing and publishing high-quality literature for free, they would organize to either destroy those works or find a way to tax or control their distribution, just like proprietary software and FOSS.
Citation needed. Writing a book, on average, makes people very little money. Some of the funniest or most entertaining content I've read has been on sites with user-generated content, such as Reddit, where there's no (direct) profit motive for good writing.
Profit motive or not, people will continue to write. Homer and Shakespeare lived in a time with no copyright laws and produced some of the greatest works of literature.
I'm not advocating for zero copyright laws, but I call bullshit on this assertion that creative works exist only due to their protection.
I wonder how did you arrive at that.
It's sort of common knowledge that only 1-2% of books written will net any sort of profit, so one might just as well write for free. As many, many people do, and outperform the for-profit writers too, on quality.
The only way to get to the point where you earn a living as a writer, or actor, or film maker, or painter... is to start off by doing it without getting paid. The fact that most people ultimately fail isn’t evidence that they’re not interested in succeeding.
Aspiring writers can aspire for fame, an audience, enthusiastic reviews, a platform, or loyal fans. Do those necessarily put food on the table? No, but many people happily write, perform, paint, etc. knowing that it won't pay the bills. The idea that everyone is in it for the money is a blanket statement that I'm not sure is even true for most creatives.
You can make a separate claim about whether artists should be able to financially support so that they can make art full time, but that's quite a different claim.
This line gets trod out every time there is a discussion like this on HN, but it still isn’t true. I suspect this attitude comes primarily from people in STEM fields, because there only the most recent content is relevant, and recent content is available in digital form. But there are still whole fields – e.g. archaeology, linguistics, history, literature – where so many books have never been digitized. Anyone interested in such topics today often has to turn to a paper book that is a few decades old, and so thank goodness for libraries that have abundant stacks or can get you quick and cheap ILL.
That is true even for many things that a layman readership might want to read, not just a scholarly audience. For example, a lot of 20th-century poetry is not available in ebook form, and with their limited typesetting capabilities, MOBI/EPUB are terrible formats for reading that genre anyway.
There are also cost issues even when the book is already public domain. Yes, there have been efforts to scan a lot of old books, but often that has just been making fairly low-resolution scans with little or no clean-up process, and assembling those scans into huge and ungainly PDFs. That is OK for old prose works where a reader may only need to consult a single page. But appropriately digitizing something like a book of elaborately typeset poetry, or an art book (i.e. a large-format book with reproductions of paintings) requires a great deal of human effort, and that is expensive. It is no surprise that the print format still reigns in those genres.
I’m with the grandparent here – the problem isn’t the amount of work required to republish a book in a digital-first format like EPUB. It’s the fact that sharing books electronically in any format is a copyright violation, so the scans that exist already aren’t publicly accessible in DRM-free formats. That being the case, recreating those books in digital-first formats requires even more effort (because you have to find and scan the book first), for almost no reward (because you can’t publish the results).
I think I know why- the process of getting a Gutenberg book working on iOS is surprisingly difficult (multiple steps requiring a priori knowledge) and, more importantly for this conversation, my library is totally cut out of the loop and loses its relationship with me. That matters to them for funding purposes (politicians love to see higher utilization and lower costs per loan.) It matters to me because my library isn’t able to add any value to the experience by, for example, recommending great public domain kids books because they don’t have a channel to deliver them to me.
While the bones of what I’d like to see does appear to exist- an eReader app that puts a better layer over free ePubs. However, it excludes the libraries. I think libraries can add value with organization, recommendations and reading lists, and a good app could provide cross device sync and history (like kindle).
What stops a library from buying a physical book, scanning and digitizing it, sticking the physical book in a vault, and then making the book available via a e-lending system that ensures only one copy is checked out?
Libraries can also share the digitized version with other libraries who have bought physical books. To go one step further, what stops a bunch of libraries from pooling their digitized collections together and making it available to sister libraries. I think there is nothing in current law that stops it or is there?
What in the law allows e-book publishers to make distinction between physical copies of books owned by libraries and digital books? Seems to me like they are holding libraries hostage over a barrel because they can.
[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900...
Does what Google books have done and their work with Haathi Trust (https://www.hathitrust.org/) fall in the same category? I thought this was tested in courts with respect to books. There is analogous case law backing up music CDs, won't that hold?
I'm not a lawyer, so check your local laws, but I know that such a thing has happened for the BBC's Doomsday programme in order to save it from laser disc rot, so one can only assume that this logic applies to other things.
I'd be worried about libraries.
They will just turn into a ephemeral place to get free books rather than the PirateBay.
It's a cultural loss turning them into something that just saves money.