The Seattle Public Library is reducing maximum digital holds
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shelftalkblog.wordpress.com
This may seem surprising, but patron holds are the single biggest factor in rising costs. To maintain reasonable wait times, the Library buys additional licenses of a digital title when patrons place more holds on it. That means that when hundreds of patrons place holds on a single New York Times bestseller, the costs of “buying down the holds” can quickly become astronomical."
How odd - I know it's the licenscing and I can understand the reasoning behind, but at a distance it seems like ritual almost. When they get the e-book, the data is there, and when you hold it, you get a copy, the "original" is untouched, but the library has to act as if it was unavailable.
It feels like how electric cars add artifical engine sounds.
I'm a big fan of alternatives, but have come to realize there often valid reasons why they aren't used.
We have several systems for matching resources to production because there isn't any single way that works best. But it is interesting to try to stretch each model as far as it can, for best results we can get.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "risky"? I can only think of projects that don't yet have a customer. In that case, you just don't build it until there is a customer need for it. Architects don't speculatively design buildings hoping to find a customer who wants it. I think we would be better off if the same was true of software.
I am curious if there is a open source type model for getting a higher return for doing riskier work, as economics would suggest is fair and also helpful.
That is obviously a typical closed source situation, but people find creative solutions.
Not talking about selling services, but somehow compensating for writing the code after the fact, risk adjusted, while keeping the code itself free. Might need a temporarily hybrid license to accomplish this. I.e. the code is obligated to become free, after some fixed license fees have covered the work cost and risk.
This is what labor contracts are for, no? I fulfill my side of the contract (by providing software) and then you fulfill your side of the contact (by providing money), else if I fulfill my side and you do not fulfill yours, I have a legal case against you.
I agree that they've sort of lost the plot by taking this digital lending stuff seriously.
So instead of the Seattle Library, it would be the some big tech nonprofit at best that would lisence content in bulk.
ARPANET was gracefully turned over, for the most part, to the commons, as was GPS. Public libraries are a millenium old as a concept [1], but only half a century (EDIT: millenium) old as a continuous practice [2]. We're not at the tail end of a collective-action halcyon; we're in the centre of it.
A side note, there is some sense in the artificial sounds of the ev engines. I'm blind and if not for them, I might be dead in five years, together with many no so attentive people.
I do think it should be entirely optional though.
The auditory feedback is faster and easier to process than visually seeing or physically feeling the car move, I can respond quicker and drive more accurately hence it's safer. It's also easier to notice if something is wrong or strange with the engine.
Consequently, I hate driving quiet cars (sedans especially) and find EVs annoying because they have the high pitched, hard to hear motor whine that takes away some of my attention.
If a book is popular, let the patrons "buy down" their own copy, or else wait behind 90 other people.
There is always bittorrent and filez websites: the real libraries of the digital age.
There are also ... craploads of other worthwhile books you could explore that are not held.
Libraries certainly do this. Might not be at (your suggested) 75/100 rates, but if a physical book is popular, library systems do purchase more copies.
Obviously, since patrons check it out, there is demand for it. Well, so what? There is demand for cocaine and porn; should public libraries offer that?
Demand for something doesn't ipso facto oblige a library to provide it.
Of course demand for something doesn't make it something that should be free.
On the other hand, your arguments against e-libraries are just as vague and lacking in implication.
Libraries promote literacy and/or learning with every book read. Even as a source of entertainment, it promotes a richer culture. All of which does have a total health of society benefit.
Why not? What are your goals of a public library?
Nothing with an expiring license or ongoing fees.
> Limits. You may borrow at any one time, 100 total items per library card, including up to 10 console games and up to 30 DVDs/Blu-rays.
Also, per-borrower limits are different from per-book limits.
A limit of 20 holds for a given e-book means that at most 20 people can wait in a queue for the opportunity to be the next borrower.
I don't think a latest bestseller should be in a library in the first place. Maybe a couple of years later when the hype has died down if it's still a good book, they can have it for the few people who want it for what it is rather than being trendy. But I never expect libraries to have anything new and fashionable. Movies and music too are always old or obscure, at least where I am.
It's funny that these artificial licensing constraints for software seem much more natural and acceptable. Especially software where the complete thing is distributed for free but you have to buy a license to activate it. It's even more in-you-face with network licenses where every computer in an organization can have and use a copy but you have to wait for somebody else to finish using theirs before you can use it on your computer. Oh, and then maintenance fees, and lapsed maintenance fee fees, and different prices depending on whether you buy a network or node-locked license.
I’m also generally happy when people read long-form content outside of school. I’ve certainly been guilty of not reading anything longer than a news article for long stretches.
Cutting the queue to an arbitrary number does nothing for wait times!
All it does is throw away information about the demand.
If there is a 15 hold limit, and it's fully occupied, we don't know whether the demand for the book is exactly 15, or whether it's actually 45, with an invisible backlog of 30 people having been turned away from being formally registered in the hold queue.
Those waiting to read the book now face an extra hurdle: they must repeatedly play a time-wasting lottery in order to obtain a spot in the queue. Someone who had been trying to get into the queue for weeks can have it sniped away by someone who gets in on the first try.
The only reason for trimming hold queues is if there is some resource problem; like they are running out of space in the database for tracking holds or something.
> This is because publishers use a licensing model for selling e-books to libraries. Each copy of a digital book title requires a purchase of a license. While there are many types of licenses, the most common license needs to be purchased and then re-purchased every year.
Something went very wrong in negotiations here. That's all I can say. Who allowed this deal to be penned in its exact fashion? The first publisher to set the pattern probably got a huge payday that should have never existed. LTV of the library should be cheaper vs the individual buyer because volume, but >3x!???!!
I love public libraries. I grew up in them as a safe place to hang out after school waiting for my working parents to be able to get me.
It makes the funding pie shift materially from other things like facilities, staffing, etc. If you're unfamiliar with the Seattle area, the Public Library covers a number less privileged neighborhoods where a safe place is very much needed. This actually makes me angry.
Publishers claim that ebooks are totally different and have to be licensed instead of purchased because it's the internet. This is, of course, a naked money grab, but then they threaten to sue anyone who tries to call them on it. Most libraries don't have the resources to litigate it. The Internet Archive is currently making the attempt. Give them money or call your legislators and tell them to pass a law making it clear that the first sale doctrine applies to digital.
Part of the challenge is that reselling digital goods in a way that doesn't allow you to resell to multiple people isn't a solved problem. Crypto is probably the closest to a solution, but obviously that isn't widely adopted in a way that would work for ebooks yet.
Replace "digital goods" with "artworks", and yes it is a solved problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_authenticity
This isn't even close to a new problem. Anyone with a printing press can print thousands of copies of someone else's book, make them look like the original and sell them. The thing that prevents this is that if you do it you can be sued. There is no technical measure preventing it, it's just against the law to do that.
If anything digital copies make this easier, because each copy could have a randomly generated UUID and then if you're selling 50 copies without 50 distinct legitimate UUIDs, you're caught.
I'm not sure this is the right way to look at it. It's more likely that nobody "allowed" the situation to happen, and the publishers just had much stronger bargaining power. So libraries either pay to participate and adjust their budget accordingly, or don't have e-books to lend out.
Or, put more provocatively in a forum run by a startup incubator: capitalism allowed this to happen.
My local library does appear to have a large enough budget to cater for this new demand but I can understand if many other city libraries don't.
But there's also kind of a mismatch of incentives at play here. As a patron, I really care more about throughput than latency on every hold I place. It takes me days or weeks to enjoy what I've checked out. But so does everyone else, so there usually isn't something I want on the shelves. In order to keep up throughput, I need something in my holds list ready when I return something. So I have a few dozen holds that go into the system as basically lottery tickets.
If it were just me, a policy of "unlimited holds, 2 out at a time" Netflix style would probably work, and I try to implement that by pausing (when I remember). As long I have an item or two out, I'd rather the librarians didn't consider my holds as any kind of "wait time" to optimize.
Ah, I suppose their goal is to nudge people towards cheaper physical book borrowing, not just reduce borrowing overall.
I love Libby, I want to see it survive.
Ten checkouts seems low enough that it's likely to get regularly cause problems. 100 checkouts seems too high. So start bisecting. 50? Almost certainly too high. 25 maybe reasonable.
They also might have p90 checkout rates and found that 25 is a data driven choice. Librarians are smart people.
I got mine in elementary school... My "signature" is in all caps with backwards letters!
That "even" looks out of place. Since I would expect some digital detritus that can be reproduced in unlimited copies at close to zero cost to cost less, then I would say that it "sometimes even costs more than the actual book".
It's not surprising when it's less; "even" adds emphasis on some parameter that has gone beyond expectation.
These libraries have less money to spend on expensive ebook subscriptions, but at the same time ebooks are much more useful to patrons who live a long ways from the library and may have difficulty going to check out physical books.
The same probably applies to libraries that serve more impoverished populations.
The book I place On Hold today might be more important to me than the one I added two weeks ago.
> This is because publishers use a licensing model for selling e-books to libraries. Each copy of a digital book title requires a purchase of a license. While there are many types of licenses, the most common license needs to be purchased and then re-purchased every year.
This is why I have zero sympathy for Publishers' efforts to go after the Internet Archive for their scan and lend digitap library. The publishers have been price gouging libraries in ways that shoild be straight up illegal and most Authors have gone along with it.
In the past, libraries could buy physical books and that was it. But once, own forever. Maybe they’d need to purchase a lot of copies of popular books or replace damaged and lost items. Otherwise, the rest of the money could go toward local programs that help the community.
Now, publishers will try to essentially extract surplus funds away from the community for extra profit margins that they don’t need to stay in business. In the past, a library that stopped buying books still had books. Now, a library that fails to pay their tithe will become a shell.
Does every library do this? I know when I want something popular from King County Public Library I often find that there's a weeks or months long waitlist.
But often times those popular titles are rather frivolous, only popular because they're new, and I'd be just as happy if I'd read something older.
I wonder how much it would cost to surface an in-stock recommendation in lieu of a too-popular hold whenever a user goes to request such a hold.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...
So that the material is then in their home, only for their use, rather than in the library?
But, hold your horses; the proposal is actually about having some people who pay, in exchange for a few meager perks. Not to make it an entirely paid system.
Here in Canada, we sort of have a working healthcare system. (Not like in civilized countries in the EU, or in Japan, though; another topic). Anyway, I can visit an emergency room and not pay a cent. Yet, people staying in the hospital can pay to upgrade to private rooms. It's just one of those rational compromises in a strained system.
Why have a cow at the idea of people donating money to a library in exchange for some privileges, while it continues to be mainly free.
The Library has increased investment in digital collections to meet patron interest.
the most common license needs to be purchased and then re-purchased every year.
And copyright, despite the name, is not a right - it's a privilege granted by society, with the notion that it is a net benefit for said society. Libraries are a part of that equation, and it's not unreasonable to expect some special dispensations there.
Which helps the library improve the economics and provide the best service for the resources they have to work with.
Having each reader's hold list interpreted as an ordered prioritized list would add even more information. People with similar lists but differing priorities would be served even better, more cheaply.
Is this an economically rational outcome for a not-obvious reason, or have libraries been very poor negotiators here, in the way they have spent public funds; or have e-book sellers been exploitative (or a bit of both)?
My other guess is, that it really is more expensive. I think, the publisher's digital infrastructure is really bad. And there is a lot of overhead when publishing a new book with lots of DRM on it. And most books don't get sold that often. So a small number digital purchases must pay for that over-proportional up-front cost.
Nassau County and NYPL have a maximum of three. Lol. Carry on.
I used to buy my ebooks until I realized libraries had ebook catalogues. A large portion of the books I've borrowed are sales the author lost, they ought to be compensated somehow.
I'm out of the habit of using the library because I was far away from one, but my normal approach is to just buy the physical copies of the book, regardless of whether I read that or the physical one. There are publishers who go out of their way to be drm free and i do make a point to buy those (Tor comes to mind).
0. Stick to real books that don't impose technical limitations or ongoing costs.
1. Promote piracy at every opportunity. Fuck the big 5 publishers and their celebrity book advance deals.
Forcing libraries to repurchase their entire collection every year should be illegal. I would also settle for a loophole that would allow the library to OCR a physical copy they own and then own the resulting digital copy.
We could have public libraries be entirely outside the copyright system. I doubt it’d have a material effect on production of new books.
If as a society we have a problem that our libraries are too popular, then that’s probably a good thing.
> I would also settle for a loophole that would allow the library to OCR a physical copy they own and then own the resulting digital copy.
Something about this reminds me of that company with the thousands of tiny antennas that got sued to oblivion.
you left out "politically doable."
There's a good reason why copyright law is as f&cked up as it is: it's the major holders of copyrights now.
Go for, say 25 years with no formalities. For 25 to 50 years, you have to file a copyright registration with the Library of Congress and pay a modest fee. For 50 to 100 years, you have to pay a huge fee (millions), just so a few classic movies people will still pay for can have coverage, and some famous music that still generates revenue can be covered.
The point of copyright is to encourage creation of content. But do we actually have a problem with too little content being created these days? If anything, it's the opposite - there's an overabundance of content, to the point where the actual problem is finding the real gems in this firehose (and this does not correlate with price or popularity at all).
Maybe it's time to just drop the whole thing altogether. It does mean that the only people who will write books then will be the ones who either enjoy it as a hobby, or feel very strongly about saying something. And I'm pretty sure that this will still result in more content being created than there is actual demand for.
I really wish this could be the case, but I strongly doubt, which ever country we are in, the politicians we voted in will be on our sides.
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, extending the right of first sale to digital goods would benefit everyone without requiring a special exception for libraries.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has, I think, such an exemption.
Where is the line between this and something along the lines of libgen? I’ve been using distributed libraries for years and haven’t paid for a textbook once…
The fact I can just wait to checkout a lot of books I'd otherwise buy digitally massively cuts back on me buying books in the end. I practically don't even subscribe to magazines anymore because it's so easy and free to just check them out on Libby. I just went on a long road trip and had tons of hours of audiobooks digitally delivered for zero cost up front.
Obviously I'm just N = 2 (my wife is the same) but I imagine some decent chunk of potential book sales are similar.
Thankfully, the local library is a traditional American institution ready and capable of doing that for myself and others in my community.
I guess it depends on when you pay your property tax bill (or when your landlord does). I know I pay over $200/year in taxes to the local library, so my family tries to make heavy use of the place.
I'm surprised we've made it this far into the digital age without more consumer protection in this space. PC game companies eliminated secondary markets 20 years ago and that model has expanded to nearly all other media.
That was what the Internet Archive was doing.
They got sued and the last I heard, had lost at every level. That said, I don't know that the lawsuits are over yet.
To be clear, no one claims that IA digitally lent out more copies than it physically had. The publishers argued that IA couldn't make a digital copy and lend that instead of the physical copy.
> [2024-04-19] Today, the Internet Archive has taken a decisive final step in our ongoing battle for libraries’ digital rights by submitting the final appellate reply brief [PDF] in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library.
https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/19/internet-archive-stands-...
“Furthermore, they argued that the Internet Archive was not abiding by CDL, as it had acknowledged that its partner libraries were not always withdrawing their physical copies from their shelves.”
Are you sure no one argued they weren’t lending more books than they had? Specifically during the pandemic it is true that just kind of decided that it was probably the case that there were plenty of library books not being distributed (note books they didn’t own) so it was ok to loan basically as many copies as they wanted