Libraries struggle to afford e-books, seek new laws in fight with publishers
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Now with a significant portion of textbooks (and books in general) become mainly E-books, the industry limited library capabilities and required pay per lend and restrict number of simultaneous lends. For papers, many universities canceled access contracts because it became too costly. Not to mention that smaller universities couldn't afford most of these subscriptions anyway.
Publishing industry really needs more regulation. Free market hardly work there.
(Let's assume for the sake of the question that the book I buy is also DRM free.)
It's a really gross industry
In theory, a publisher could sell you an ebook, declare that you own it and can transfer it (like a digital right of first sale) as long as you don't keep a copy.
In practice, it would be a hassle for libraries to verify that permission, so even if you had such a book, they might say thanks but no thanks. Essentially all ebooks are sold under license that each book is for your use only, and no transfers are allowed. Because ebooks are licensed, and not sold complete with a right of first sale, retailers can set whatever conditions they want depending on who they sell to, and the market can't arbitrage. That's why libraries have to pay more for an ebook they're allowed to lend 10 times than you have to pay for the same ebook on Amazon.
It used to be a small industry that nonetheless allowed a brick and mortar store to thrive as a secondary bookstore to the university's student union. Never mind the savings for students.
This is how we are. For now.
The problem from a broader point of view is a coordination problem. The people making the buying decisions (professors and departments) are not the people paying (the students). I would wholeheartedly support legislation that forced professors to pay the same textbook fees as their students, and for departments to be required to cover the costs for scholarship students.
I’ll bet we would see a lot more schools opting into open source textbooks and articles from the library if that were the case.
What will happen is that universities will pass these costs to all students where now paying students will pay more.
A better regulation will be encouraging and funding more open access materials that can be used and require public funding receivers to adopt them or decrease the funding and cap the tuition increases.
When I was in college, the internet was relatively young, but that didn't stop us from using it to cut out the bookstore out as the middleman for reselling books. Our local test Usenet group was where all the cool kids hung out and we used that as a place to sell and trade used books for a fraction the cost of the bookstore.
But that mechanism no longer works in the ebook era. So I'm not surprised students found another way.
(Dad was a teacher, too, and he also couldn't bear forcing his students to pay for new editions of a textbook. So he wrote his own. Students could print copies at cost in the print shop (pre-internet). I've continued the tradition of writing my own books and putting them online for free for the students. Greed over educational materials is a poor look. Also, AI is coming.)
It saddens me that with github and the like, and the armies of wikipedia entries, there aren't open source textbooks of greater/higher quality than any of the publishers. I guess biology and some sciences deviate a lot edition to edition, but basic math? physics? chemistry? economics? history? languages?
Of course institutes of higher learning have well exposed themselves as being anything but in the last couple decades. So it doesn't really surprise me. The entire "open coursework" movement died quite quickly when the colleges realized this might cut into their annual 10% hike to tuition.
But like your father, I'm surprised some retired teachers don't do this as a side project, or an emeritus professor, or SOMEONE that wants to leave a legacy.
You could have a site that presents concepts in entirely different fashions, so you could choose a path that suits you, or if a particular concept didn't stick, have it presented a different way.
State institutions in particular should be required to produce and use open textbooks and courseware. Rile up some republicans to make it contingent on getting their state funding (they love doing that).
This is even more egregious since there is the entire British Commonwealth of nations/english speakers and their educational systems to leverage.
My sense is that there's quite a bit of "open coursework" out there if you're talking about mostly raw materials.
If you're talking about MOOCs, universities started pulling back after it became obvious that they had mostly "not lived up to expectations." The combination of the students most needing them largely lacking motivation, the fact that credentials weren't generally viewed as valuable, the lack of lab and tutorial resources, and VC-companies pivoting are probably just the main factors.
Thanks for that. My professors were in part like yours. But some other professors (I think it was about MBA folks, not IT people) apparently urge everyone to buy their really expensive book. And if you did not, you would have no idea about the weird case in chapter 2, he makes the exams about ..
You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?
The government-granted monopoly, not so much.
Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.
It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.
You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP.
This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn’t work here
You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for air. But there is. This is the market served by submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA filters.
If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a market to supply them, they'd just generally be really cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare. Likewise there would still be a market for creating works, because people would pay for commissions. There might not be as many of them, but there would still be a market.
Sure you can. See Germany in the 19th century with no IP protections. Business and prosperity boomed!
Consider also the incredible success of open source software.
What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.
You are unfairly taking credit for the fundamental human need of self expression, and assigning it to your preferred ideological position.
Can you name 5 famous stories, before year 1500, that were made ‘for the market’?
Even penicillin was not created for the market. Most scientific discoveries weren’t.
Because I know what it means to create something for the market?
> Can you name 5 famous stories, before year 1500, that were made ‘for the market’?
Given that I've already pointed out that all such stories were made for the market, how do you expect me to answer this?
Can I name five famous stories from before the year 1500?
The Tale of Cupid and Psyche
The Shahnameh
Nüwa Knocks a Hole in the Sky
The Divine Comedy
The Epic of Gilgamesh
> myths of Ancient Greece, the bible, ancient folklore about fairy folk - none of it was produced for a market of any kind.
As I have already pointed out, all of these were produced for a market. Why would you state otherwise? What do you think it means to offer something on a market? (Why do you think the general term for the space where these things live is "the marketplace of ideas"?)
> Even penicillin was not created for the market. Most scientific discoveries weren’t.
Penicillin wasn't created at all, as you suggest by calling it a "discovery". But we use it today because it was offered on the market by someone who hoped to receive the rewards that the market would offer for it.
You made unsubstantiated assertion that lays claim to a millennia of human history. You offered no evidence of any kind.
> I know what it means to create something for the market
Firstly, that that statement itself is debatable. Secondly, one would need extraordinary knowledge of history to make claims about for thousands of stories written across thousands of years.
I cannot help but conclude that you are an ideologue and you believe there is no life outside ‘the market’ and when I write something in my personal blog, or invent a story for my child, that’s ’the market’ too.
I find this level of ideological appropriation repulsive.
Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the context of lending libraries is for when that isn't the case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local library because you can get it for free from the authors.
There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.
Let them eat competition.
Unless you mean specifically textbooks, which are inflating because piracy has destroyed the demand (the annual revenue of the textbook market is down ~33% since 2014, despite increases in both prices and enrollment in colleges). You can see the causal link here as increases in pricing are lagging decreasing sales. If the prices were driving the decreasing sales you would expect the opposite behavior.
https://archive.attn.com/stories/1164/heres-exactly-why-coll...
Between 1975 and 2014 college books outpaced inflation over three times.
BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy, it's the original thing.
Notice what happens when you take the original thing (intellectual property) out of the equation, your statement becomes "Bayer has a monopoly on aspirin", which they don't, because the Aspirin trademark became generic and it's not under patent.
Taking intellectual property out of a conversation about intellectual property has predictably strange and totally irrelevant results. Why is that surprising?
This is the same as saying a carpenter has a monopoly on their work. They can sell it to an employer up front by the hour or afterwards as a good. But no one else can come along and take it without paying.
You can try to subdivide any particular market but you still can't get yourself out of the second half of the post: If the products were actually substitutes then the prices would approach the marginal cost. If they're not, they're not.
College textbooks are an obvious example of this. Anybody can make "math textbook" but only one of them will have the homework problems your professor will assign in them, so you need that one and the publisher has a monopoly.
I’m nitpicking but this isn’t less regulation, it’s different regulation. Some would even say it’s more. You’re reducing a number but adding complexity with the percent sales requirement.
I can’t think of any case where regulation/government was reduced and companies responded with something less profitable for the company.
While it was mostly manufacturers building more efficient aircraft, people are generally willing to trade leg room for a cheaper fair. That’s exactly the kind of thing regulators and the free market may come to a different compromise. Worse, but cheaper is often quite appealing.
In the opposite direction, you're not actually allowed to generally buy a car without modern safety features. (Although automakers do make cars that are have higher or lower safety ratings within the regulatory framework.)
A common thread is that when push comes to shove, a lot of consumers will choose the lower price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airlines_of_the_United...
How many does Boeing have?
Convenience especially in terms of number of flights. This gets into a bunch of economic and logistical issues, but airlines are happy to abandon less profitable areas. While regulators want regular service even if the demand isn’t quite there
Service. The minimum number of attendants is based on safety, airlines would happily cut those workers.
Safety.
If you get all of these right, price decreases, demand increases, average seat occupancy goes way up, and that causes the per-seat price to drop even more, in a feedback loop. If your costs are low enough, you can go for a direct model instead of a hub-and-spoke model, catering more towards casual travelers who just want to go somewhere instead of the business types which need to go from X to Y at time Z, no matter the cost. THe direct model drives the cost down even more, as you only need one flight instead of two, and don't have to worry about the insane costs of passengers stranded at your hub when something goes wrong.
So no, it wasn't just manufacturers building more efficient aircraft.
Adjusted for inflation and including fees domestic round-trip airfare in 1979 averaged $617.47 vs $366.92 in 2016 a 40% drop. Which looks pretty good, though there was that 1979 oil crisis which needs to be accounted for which complicates the inflation comparison.
Meanwhile Jets become 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007. As airliners use a mix of newer and older aircraft there’s a delay before improvements affect prices. But most of that improvement was front loaded so by 2018 domestic airlines where getting 58 pay passenger miles per gallon of fuel an unheard of number in 1979 which again also happened to be the middle of an oil crisis.
A somewhat large part of why it is so expensive to recreate is all the regulations and burreaucracy involved in laying cables along public roads. Make that significantly easier and cheaper, and you suddenly need those last-mile regulations a lot less.
Network effects are where you actually need regulation.
When the government deregulated air travel prices, routes, and schedules.
Much like the software industry. Free software runs the world.
Maybe I'm assuming too much tho...!
I appreciate your comment regardless :)
Then libraries could buy physical or digital copies and do the thing they've always done.
One of the best features of Valve's Steam platform is exactly that it gives users the ability to perpetually install the software they have purchased, even if the publisher other removes it from the platform. If users were allowed to resale their purchased games, it would be nearly at full par with first sale doctrine.
Digital systems are a modern bypassing of such prior conventions and laws, and it makes perfect sense to extend them in that direction with time.
Secondly, you should reread their post, it’s much broader than your interpretation. They were envisioning a world where the device and copying restrictions we have today don’t exist.
My reference to quantum was saying that this usage pattern would require something like quantum entanglement to replicate the state of which copy is active among all copies.
They can't, which is the same as it is now. DRM is a farce and everything is on The Pirate Bay. Which is why restricting libraries like this is ridiculous -- anybody who doesn't care to follow the law doesn't need to get a copy from a library, they can just download it from a piracy site. The reason you go to the library instead is that you want to follow the law.
That's how it works in every library system I have dealt with
I don't know about textbooks, but the overall share of publishing industry revenue that comes from ebooks is really low. Something like 7%, and falling steadily. I had assumed it was much larger.
Piracy is seemingly the only bulwark against publisher abuses functionally. With that horrid multi-century copyright ruling, there won't be any free market in specific publications within living human lifetimes.
Libraries don't have the political power to do anything. In the video game space, piracy has been responsible for the only preservation done, and arguably enabled the market for remasters and releases on new platforms.
The ebook publishers will probably start encountering AI that is way better at OCR and scan cleanup. Imagine an AI that you simply run on a camera looking at a screen and you fast forward through a book at 10 pages per second: the AI picks it all up, scans it, possibly detecting layout and images.
You are just reacting to this because “free for me”. What industry do you work in? I want to see you backpeddle or try and explain in your response when I say the same about your “product” needing regulation.
This is hardly a free market. Libraries receive a budget to spend _ dollars on books every year. This entire publishing industry exists to capture that cashflow, because consumers aren't buying it with their own money.
The university version is more complex, but the bottom line is you do not have consumers spending their money on products they use.
If you want to publish so it is read by anyone you can only go to big ones - if you are not publishing with big ones, good luck no one will read it.
Lmao, what? I download most of books and documents from Z-library (donated several times), that's the free market. Btw, FBI seized all of their domains recently.
Most of the time I need that one medicine textbook on a narrow subject, costing $100+, which I'd use just to look something up. I'm not going to buy all these books under any condition.
Buying things with taxpayer funding and legal mandates is not free market.
Most of these problems wouldn't exist if not for copyright law, which is nothing but regulation.
You can either fix the problems by introducing more regulation for publishers or by lessening the regulatory restrictions on libraries. Make it legal for them to break DRM (and discuss / purchase / commission DRM-breaking tools), offer scans of physical books to more than one person at a time etc, and your problem is gone.
I'm guessing Husband's solution is to raise taxes to pay themselves for more expensive books.
The AAP is also suing Internet Archive, incidentally.
Other people probably have different behaviors. People I know with younger children in particular use local libraries for children's books quite a lot.
But libraries as a place you checkout books is almost certainly already on the decline. For me, the pirate sites aren't even competition. I only have limited time. I read a lot on the Internet. If there's some new book I want to read, I'll probably just buy it for my Kindle. (Obviously many people are much more price-sensitive but I wonder how many of them are using libraries today.)
I suppose it depends on your library’s offering and how many books you go through
Other eBook readers from firms such as Kobo or Onyx start at about $100 to $200, and again may be found used for a small fraction of that price.
That's still a hurdle, but roughly the cost of a new trade-paper volume with the capability to hold many hundreds or thousands of books.
Depending on what you're looking for, there are ebooks which can be found, legally, free of charge from sources such as Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, the Internet Archive (both to check out or to download with no limitations), and other libraries. The US Library of Congress has been expanding its own offerings (I'm not up on the latest, though am given to understand it's generous), and many large-city libraries (Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Kansas City, etc.) have extensive digital lending programmes.
That's without leaning on book liberation sites such as ZLib, LibGen, or Anna's Archive, though those have quite extensive holdings.
I've always been surprised that they haven't cracked down on it, given the relative ease with which you can circumvent the necessity of the Kindle store for the majority of popular titles. Simply load up Calibre, pop almost any file type into your library, and away you go. We're really living in the Limewire age for e-book piracy, even if we don't realize it.
My guess is, someone has run the math and figured out that it's better to keep people on a Kindle device and occasionally spending a few dollars, in exchange for the slow death of physical media and legitimate alternatives. When those become less readily available, then perhaps you can begin to boil the frog.
You can be sure I won't buy a kindle if I can't sideload onto it. I buy at least 5/6 new hardcover books a year from local independent retailers to support authors I like. I wish more authors would allow an e-book copy to be distributed with hardcovers they sell. Do what vinyl did.
My county library system has about 100k ebook titles and another 30k audiobooks. I've probably read or listened to well over a hundred library books since the last time I actually went to the library.
ADDED: Indeed. They use the rebranded Overdrive (Libby). Last time I looked at (maybe) Overdrive ages ago it seemed to be highly populated with things like self-help books. Looks useful.
Then I could donate my book to the library, they could scan it (or buy a scanned copy), and as long as they restricted checkouts based on the number of copies, they'd be fine.
The Internet Archive seems to do something similar, though it seems to be an issue in the courts. I wonder if libraries could donate their books to IA and direct patrons there for electronic versions.
There was a brief period of time at the beginning of COVID when the Internet Archive decided to do away with the "one digital copy per purchase" restriction, essentially arguing that since libraries across the country were closed, this was justified. [0]
The courts disagreed.
[0] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...
Every new paper book soon becomes a used book, worth zero or even negative revenue, whereas ebooks are sold de novo to every student at nearly full price with much lower fixed costs (print, distribute, stock, return). But publishers are wary of being seen as interfering with academic freedom by pushing to ebooks.
There are a couple of use cases where students overwhelmingly prefer paper. Cost savings with used books is obvious, but also, for example, if a prof -might- allow a paper book on an exam but -wouldn’t- allow laptop ebook access, most students will -never- take the risk of being disadvantaged, even if it’s only in rare cases.
I’d have to think about corresponding forces in the general publishing and public libraries realm, which I’ll assume is more complex but roughly analogous.
Publishers are waiting until there are a few successful targeted solutions and generational overturn, then paper will disappear in a blink and they will get a fat profit boost. Tech to enable this should be a nice little unicorn.
Publishers should lose copyright to every work they do not offer in perpetuity with every purchase in every format, and there should be no postsale restrictions on any item beyond what is implied by copyright.
If such a law comes, the publisher will set the price to, say, 1 billion USD.
We should have an international law that allow libraries to lend photocopies of books, like archive.org does, or just a digital copy. There has been a rise in really good digital interactive books were there is no standard way to make an (pirate) archive, so change is comming even if such a law passes.
1. Publish Your eBook by Joel Dare https://amzn.to/49WjVrn
Another part of our mission is providing libraries an open source ebook and audiobook reader called Palace. Our project is on GitHub here https://github.com/thepalaceproject.
Unfortunately this is America. Nothing can beat out profit motives forever. The libraries really never stood a chance.
Libraries now exist more as a place for community: somewhere quiet anyone can freely hang out, access resources like 3D printers (or for the very poor, public fountains/restrooms and the internet), and attend workshops. Some libraries like the Boston Public Library are still nice and active even today (https://www.bpl.org/). But unfortunately as you mentioned, people today really don't fund community, and there are a lot of degrading and closing libraries.
E.g. for a niche topic there's maybe a 5 page wikipedia article, a thousand useless seo fodder blogs, and a bunch of academic papers on the topic. At the library, I can get a 300 page comprehensive text written by an expert whose motive is to actually teach me the topic.
It’s telling that probably the single most-valuable store of knowledge on the web is… a book piracy website. And even that’s missing tons of stuff.
It's one of those fractal issues. The more you zoom in, the weirder it gets.
In the US in the state of Wisconsin has a statewide digital library last time I was a resident there. That means all libraries share the digital library across the state. My experience was a incredible variety of content at the cost of somewhat longer wait times.
The same cannot be said of Minnesota. When inquiring why Minnesota does not have the same system when chatting with our local library it came down to publishers were no longer willing to have such an agreements. The library would love to have such a system in Minnesota but the publishers are against it. I wish there was a way we could bridge readers with their authors.
As a side note I don't quite understand the downside even with the Wisconsin system. For my understanding it was contracted per book for a length of time and also a fee per read.
There was also a larger set of fair trade laws in the US because manufacturers didn't want their products to be discounted which, among other things, probably got their products on the shelves of small stores that perhaps couldn't otherwise afford to carry them.
If you set a price that's obligatory to sell book for, it won't become cheaper, it will go up.
And I just won't buy it. I see exactly zero reasons why I should care for local bookshops. I'm not made out of money and I won't buy stuff from them only to keep them alive.
Online I can get it for 40. In physical shop for 60; if it's there. Because most likely it won't be. And I can't order, none of the bookshops nearby do this.
Why should I be happy at unified price if all it means is that I will pay 1/3 more?
On the one hand, it's probably true that more people can read a digital book. Ob the other hand, I have read fewer than 20 pages of a bunch of ebooks - enough to see if I might like them.
Do these count as checkouts? Am I a very expensive library user?
(And I also am happy to have several ebooks that I'll read sometime, casually renewing them until I get to them).
Libraries can also be a nexus for social events and on site education. Very well worth the tax money. In a world of dehumanizing digital tech, libraries are a human experience.
People with money don’t need public libraries — you can buy pretty much anything easily. People spend $18 on a McDonalds meal, $9.99 for an ebook is nothing. Big city libraries are mostly homeless shelters at this point.
I’m not going to a public library to use the World Book Encyclopedia like I did 35 years ago. Pretty sure most people aren’t. I’m not going to check out some music CDs — I have Apple Music. Unless it’s some kind of rare collections library for academic research, the average library doesn’t need to exist. It’s a vestige like Blockbuster Video.
It would be cool though if people could buy library access for university digital libraries. Being able to access journal articles is pretty awesome.
First, the real estate presence of the library is extremely important. Children's storytime is one of the strongest drivers of foot traffic. Some of the buildings act as designated cooling centers during heat waves. They are community centers and gathering spaces for local organizations.
Also, just because you can spend $10 on an ebook does not mean others would choose to do the same! That's important money to many people.
Otherwise, here are some other things I've seen libraries do that I think your comment underestimates:
- supplies reading materials to jailed inmates
- helps new residents navigate city services
- manages the city archives
- provides wifi access for the 10%+ of a big city that does not have wifi at home
- gives free books to build book collections at home
- loans tools and other "maker" equipment
Not all libraries are funded well enough to do the above, and the specific definition of a library in 2024 is very hard to nail down - basically converges on a community center.
All I'm saying is that libraries are making concerted efforts to break out of the traditional definition ("gatekeeper of information") - you should check out your local library to see all that they do!
The library's annual budget is $200MM.
I wonder what proportion of the population uses the library system at all. I can't imagine it's more than 25%. If I'm right, the cost is at least $1,000 per library user per year.
This seems like a lot.
(Of the $200MM, only $22MM is spent on books/ebooks/media aka 'collections'.)
The libraries are generally comfortable and well maintained, but given the cost I wonder whether the major functions (books, space, wifi) could be provided more cheaply by Amazon and Wework.
Don't you realize that libraries are under attack by mostly all fronts (governments, politicians, publishers, copyright cartel, right wing zealots just to name a few) plus they're on the front lines of the country's problems because our government are too corrupt to do anything to help the marginalized and underprivileged. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/18/libraries-ebooks-hoopla-lib... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39474151
Also read here: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshit... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36998643
Publishers aren't different from Audio media. Authors have mkt reach through digital channels, unlike constraints of bookshelf logistics.
Why aren't they directly publishing their material? Margins are higher, without publisher fees.
And I'd meant to post the (apparently stale) article link above, rather than the HN discussion thread a second time.
(I know why comment edits are limited in time scope ... but it's annoying. And yes, there is a workaround, ask mods how ;-)
Time-limited and self-destructing book copies, as for any (digital) media, is nothing short of a cultural atrocity that only philistines could have come up with. The word "scam" is more than apt for this latest effort by the publishing industry to milk the maximum amount of profit out of something without putting in any additional work or providing any additional value in return. Asking money for doing literally nothing -- I don't think that calling that a scam goes too far. This from an industry who, like many others, keeps claiming that they are acting in the name of protecting the creatives, while having a long and flowery history of fleecing and bleeding dry those very artists.
I buy the used paperback used for $3.
> a price that can't be haggled with publishers.
Of course they can haggle. They just don't know how to.
I buy nearly all my books used.
It's possible to put a protective cover on a used book.
The books at my local library come in many different sizes, including the size of a paperback novel.
They certainly can. They choose not to. When you decide to demand a special binding and special print run, and when you will pay any price, you're going to pay a lot more.