Pull quote: “Rather than navigating their patrons away from the library’s web presence to Balkanized, often commercial, third-party platforms, each with a different discovery and delivery experience, librarians have been demanding a single, easy-to-use, easy-to-search platform — an integration of the ILS with ebook vendor platforms.”
Pull quote: “Marx offered the NYPL as a pilot testing lab for virtually any ebook distribution model any publisher would like to test, on a scale of three branches to three boroughs and three months to three years. ‘We can assess it up the wazoo; everything you’re concerned about, we can test,’ said Marx.”
Pull quote: “Where we go forward at this moment is important. I appreciate ALA talking to publishers. I understand the place we’re in. But so far, what’s been happening hasn’t had any effect; as I pointed out last week, it’s almost as if the publishers are thumbing our noses at us. If anything, despite our best efforts and strategies, we’re beginning to look a little bit Neville Chamberlainish. Exactly what’s next is unclear to me, but about a year ago a friend approached me with an idea: what about legislation? At the time, I wondered why or how that would work. Right now, I’m wondering why it wouldn’t.”
Pull quote: “Recognize this crisis as a reading-ecology problem and a fight for the right to read, not just a public-library problem. It doesn’t matter that this has primarily been about Overdrive, whose customer base is overwhelmingly public libraries (though Overdrive has higher-ed customers, including Yale, Pitt, and my tiny library). We’re all part of the reading ecology.”
Pull quote: “But over the past year, as the library market has been further roiled, as other companies, such as Penguin Group, essentially stepped back from the market altogether, HarperCollins has remained not only committed to its model but also to the market. And for this, it is receiving from some librarians, if not praise, at least a sober reappraisal — even from some of those who are holding firm to their boycott.”
Pull quote: “Library Journal’s Barbara Genco had pointed out in her morning session that ‘the library market—with 169 million users—is one of the largest sleeping giants in the United States’. The giant is waking up, stretching, and feeling its strength. The take-away was clear. As Coates said: ‘publishers need libraries more than libraries need publishers. These issues need to be resolved.’”
Pull quote: “Publishers have contempt for the authors they need to write works, and the readers they need to read works. Publishers are scared that the internet is going to disintermediate their asses into the dustbin of history, and the best response that many of them have come up with is to express their fear through hatred.”
Pull quote: “Ebooks are curb cuts for libraries. For those of us struggling financially, or wiped out after an long day without the time or transportation to get to the local library, or physically disabled and unable to easily move around, being able to take advantage of the tremendous convenience of downloading a book onto a e-reader or mobile phone literally means the difference between reading and not reading. And I realized by the end of the week that this purposeful denial of equal access is what infuriates me most about the actions of publishers against libraries. At the moment when we have the opportunity to improve the lives of many of our neighbors, publishers concern themselves with competitive positioning and an appropriate amount of ‘friction’ in library access.”
Pull quote: “
So, ebooks in public libraries, open access to publicly funded scholarship, quality, properly funded public transit. It’s all the same.
Private interests are attacking the public good. Let’s stop them.”
Pull quote: “’It’s really hard to overstate the impact of Amazon’s particular deal with OverDrive and the shock wave that sent through the industry,’ said Paul Aiken, the executive director of The Authors Guild. ‘The notion that public libraries, for the first time, would be sending their patrons to a commercial website for borrowing books — and not just any commercial website but the website of the entity that has a tight grip on the online marketplace for books — was bound to get a negative reaction,’ he said.”
Pull quote: “However, one upshot of those talks, as LJ reported, was publishers’ concerns that if library loans become too ‘frictionless,’ in other words, do not involve a physical trip to the library to borrow and return a book, that it will eat into their sales. The desire to increase this friction may lead the recalcitrant publishers to demand a business model in which they will only make their ebooks available to public libraries if they are used in the library or if a patron is required to bring their device to the library and load the title onto the device in the library, then bring it home. This would essentially eliminate all the convenience of borrowing ebooks from a home computer or device.”
Pull quote: “As a librarian and as a reader, I am tired of publishers walking away from the library table. I have no problem with them walking away from a particular third party vendor, but only if they have a plan in place to offer up their own platform or be signed with an alternate vendor already.”
Pull quote: “Another drawback is that they don’t have books from the major publishers in there. They do have books from 45 publishers, but I searched for our most popular Overdrive ebooks, and none of them were in Freading. So at best, this would be a supplement to Overdrive, until the bigger publishers get on board.”
