My philosophy on: ebooks

By -
I promised Anna I wouldn't be so heavily ebooks focused. Never trust a lawyer, Anna.

Ebooks generally divide people into two camps:

Group A: Love them! Will do anything for them! I don't care what you charge me or what usage restrictions you place on me, just give me more more more.

Group B: No thank you. I'll stick with print. I know what I'm getting, I can do what I want want it. Straighten out the formats, stop the vendor wars and then we'll talk.

I'm actually not in either of these groups. I'm more of an A-/B+. I love ebooks, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I hate the angst surrounding them, but not so much that I'll refuse to buy them.

Over the weekend, news leaked out that there was going to be an ebook summit between ALA and the publishers who won't sell ebooks to libraries (Simon & Schuster and Macmillan--Penguin is invited along too). This is great news. Wouldn't you love to be a coffee cup on the table in that boardroom? So, everyone is talking. What are my concerns?

Concern #1: Libraries have been referred to as "places of free reading" for so long, people are starting to accept it as the truth. Yes, even those people who write tax checks to their government for library privileges. This is one of those things that is so often repeated that even librarians start to tout it. "We let people read books for free!" No. We don't. Tax payers have pre-paid for those reading privileges. That is money we, in turn, use to BUY library materials. Libraries need to push back against the scary specter of freeloading readers because it isn't true.

Concern #2: We're coming in to these "negotiations" late. Nothing to be done about that, but it does make things more difficult. Some things have already been done that will not be undone. For instance, price of ebooks. Consumers, raise your hand if you'd pay $25.99 for an ebook. Consumers? Hello? Librarians, raise your hand if that price even registers on your radar.

Exactly.

We are so used to paying regular hardcover price for ebooks that it doesn't even warrant a mention anymore. Even though I swore I'd never do it. Yep, I did. I swore it to the New York Times. That was silly. They never forget anything.

But we're not starting from a blank slate where we can negotiate a downward price on ebooks, even if we're buying multiple copies. The status quo is hardcover price (or 2x hardcover price. Or 5x hardcover price...) and a publisher who is already selling you 0 copies has absolutely no incentive to sell you any copies for less than their competitors, right? 

Concern #3: Show me the models. We started with a model of one book/one user. Libraries grumbled a little, but it made sense. That was the way the print world worked, so it was easy to explain to patrons. And, it made sense to us from a business perspective too. We get that publishers wouldn't want us to buy one copy and let 1,000 simultaneous users read. Forcing holds forces us to buy more copies. All things we are familiar with. The world turned in harmony.

But is that the model a publisher coming in to the library market would use as their beginning bargaining position? I don't think so. I wouldn't. If I were a publisher, I would start with the 26 use model because that is a better position for me. Why would I start bargaining from a position of unlimited circulations when you're already letting my competitor set limits? So we start at 26 and bargain from there. But wait, right now you get exactly 0 loans of my material, so 26 seems excessive. This is new for us, we're not sure how this lending thing will work out, so maybe we should make it 15 loans. Or, perhaps, 10. 10 is still better than none, right?

Is everything on the table? Re-licensing after every use? Copies sold in batches instead of single items? Licensing for time periods instead of uses? A model where we could stop licensing a title? Ownership? Is ownership of titles on the table?

I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tips for Weeding Your Reference Collection

By -
If you are responsible for collection development in just about any size or kind of library, the chances are good that there's been a recent push to reduce the size of your print reference collection.* Print reference materials are, to use a regional expression, wicked expensive. They are also being used less and less as librarians turn to databases and patrons turn to the immediate gratification of the internet. As budgets decline and libraries look to use their space in new and creative ways, physical reference collections are obvious targets for heavy weeding. Here at my library, we are reducing our reference collection by 50%. At our branches, reference collections will be cut by 75% . . . this time around. So where do you start when you are lucky enough to get the assignment to chop chop chop? Before You Begin Get a firm idea of how much the administration wants to reduce the reference collection. Survey the collection and determine how much you're going to have to weed
Read more

What the Heck is Denewing?

By -
Image
"Denewing" is the term I invented for the process of taking books from the new shelf and changing their status to, for lack of a better word, "not-new." Sure, I could farm the work out to other people in my library, but it's never been clear to me why I would when denewing presents the perfect opportunity to see what has been circulating, how many times, and (thanks to Evergreen, our new ILS) the last library at which an item was checked out. Plus, peeling stickers = therapeutic. Denewing is something I can do on desk while I help people with their various computer issues. Denewing also makes your new shelves look better. Because space is at such a premium in most public libraries (although regular weeding could help with that-- cough ), the New Shelf is the place where we have the best opportunity to showcase what we're buying and catch people's attention. The new shelf should be positioned somewhere where it will catch patrons' eyes and shout (it
Read more

The black shelves are over there.......

By -
Speaking of collection maintenance... A question that has come up time and time again (in the real world, in the twitter world, on blogs, at conferences...) is the idea of separate shelving for African American books. If you follow me on twitter, you've heard this rant before. Why do we segregate books by skin color, blah blah blah. And, really, it isn't even the skin color of the character that matters, but the skin color of the author . You won't find the Derek Strange books (by Pelecanos...go read them now!) the AF-AM section. I've tried to trace this back to see where it began because it wasn't always this way. Books used to be shelved by genre in fiction, and by Dewey in non-fiction. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that once upon a time there wasn't much in the way of current, popular fiction written about black people by black people. There was Terry McMillan...and there were others, but she was the big household name. Lots of people came int
Read more