Sadly, Tom Clancy, author of military/political thrillers, passed away yesterday at a hospital in Baltimore. Many of his bestselling novels featured Jack Ryan and were made into hit movies like The Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games. He was only 66.
Library eBooks, Part I: How if Works covered the main players in the e-book to Library food chain and Part II: The Fully Illustrated Guide to Borrowing eBooks, was a simple "how to" guide for using your local library to borrow ebooks.
In this, Part III, we will look at how the publishing industry seems determined to allow their short-term, panic-stricken goals to damage their long term survival and even growth. I have long contended that American businesses focus too much on the quarterly reports to Wall Street that are used to determine their stock value, instead of the long term goals of the business itself. However, there must some advantage in that approach since businesses continue to cut back on costs (read jobs) to improve those same quarterly reports.
Admittedly, the advent of ebooks has created all kinds of problems for traditional publishers, as did the advent of digital music for the record business, but publishers seem to be having greater difficulties in considering the need for innovation on their part. Apparently they believe that if they build a high enough price wall, they can destroy, or at least slow down, the growth of this infant technology.
Their first step was to collude with Apple to force Amazon to increase its $9.99 best seller ebook pricing. They settled with the Department of Justice and promised never to do it again for two or three years, anyway. Their intent seems to be controlling the price of the digital media instead of finding a way to remain relevant in an era of greater competition and innovation.
And as always, the people who will suffer the most from the publishers' high price wall will be those who can least afford it. Americans who rely on their local libraries for their reading materials.
Art Brodsky is a library advocate in Montgomery County, Maryland, who has been working with the American Library Association on e-book issues. This morning he published an OpEd for Wired Magazine, "The Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading," wherein he takes to task the publishing industry's usurious pricing of library ebooks. He didn't use that term, I did. He wrote:
The collusion of large ebook distributors in pricing has been a public issue for a while, but we need to talk more about how they are priced differently to consumers and to libraries. That's how ebooks contribute to the ever-growing divide between the literary haves and have-nots.
[snip]
Take the example of J.K. Rowling's pseudonymous book, Cuckoo's Calling. For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 from book distributor Baker & Taylor - close to the consumer price of $15.49 from Barnes & Noble and of $15.19 from Amazon. But even though the ebook will cost consumers $6.50 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, libraries would pay $78 (through library ebook distributors Overdrive and 3M) for the same thing.
The publishers claim that a library would have to replace a physical book once it became tattered and torn through use. But would they really have to replace every book 4.4 times, which is the price difference between an ebook and a DTB? Within one year? Publishers also attach lending limitations on ebooks which they do not attach to physical books.
At the BookExpo America in New York this past May, publishers were caught red-handed calling an ebook sale to a library a "license" when they talked to librarians but wanting it called a sale when they talked to authors about the same library ebook. The reason for the different terminology, according to Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Author's Guild, had to do with a publisher's obligation to pay its authors 25% on a sale and 50% on a license. As I wrote at the time: "In plain English, they want the transaction to be a license when it restricts a library's ability to loan or resell it, but they want it to be a sale when it comes time to compensate the author. Pretty cool how they do that, isn't it?"
In Brody's article, he discusses the efforts of some authors like Cory Doctorow who are strong supporters of local libraries. Authors who recognize that with the closing of so many independent bookstores and the end of book reviews in journals and newspapers that readers are now, more than ever, likely to do their browsing in libraries.
In this video Cory Doctorow makes it clear that libraries are the only institutions “whose only interest is in promoting authorship, books, and knowledge to the exclusion of things like shareholders or Kindle ebook sales and lock ins and ad sales.”
Ursula K LeGuin wrote in May:
The corporations’ confused and panic-driven search for an “acceptable business model” for the library e-book has led to some truly grotesque solutions:
- HarperCollins rents a library the license to an e-book for 26 uses, after which the license expires and the book goes poof.
- Hachette sells e-books to libraries at three times the print price for the first year — and one and a half times print price thereafter.
- Macmillan sells only its Minotaur crime and mystery e-books to libraries, asking $25 apiece — again about three times as much as anybody else has to pay.
- Random House has raised prices for some of its e-books by 300 percent.
- Simon and Schuster, which previously refused to sell e-books to libraries at all, is now trying out a pilot program: A library will be able to buy license for any e-book in the S&S catalogue for one year, and each book can be lent any number of times — “so long as it is being used by one borrower at a time.”
Perhaps we should be glad that this experiment is being carried out only in parts of New York City.
Authors are joining with the American Library Association to advocate for equitable access to digital content. There are the exceptions, like novelist
David O. Stewart, who feels libraries are some kind of socialist plot to deprive authors of the fruits of their labors or something.
“Traditionally, the publishing industry, and writers, have subsidized the public library system, a system that is undeniably socialist."
I am glad I don't have to be the one to tell him it is much worse than he thinks. In addition to having to subsidize these socialistic institutions, he is being forced to accept our tax dollars, which provide the funding for libraries, in order to do that subsidizing. Perhaps, like wealthy farmers who rejoice when food stamps were cut, he is capable of the mental gymnastics that allow him to reconcile the conflict.
More reasonable writers are asked to join these authors and sign onto the Authors Stand with Libraries statement which includes:
Literature and knowledge—in all their forms—are essential. Access to them through libraries must not be denied. We believe:
- All published works must be available for libraries to purchase and lend to library users.
- Access to and use of ebooks must equitably balance the rights and privileges of readers, authors, and publishers.
- Digital content must be accessible to all people, regardless of physical or reading disabilities.
- Pricing models must be reasonable and flexible.
- Library patrons must be able to access digital content on the device of their choosing.
- Reading records must remain private in the Digital Age.
The American Library Association also provides
information for readers who wish to help keep ebooks in libraries.
As an avid reader for over fifty-five years, I will always be grateful to publishers that have brought me such wonderful reading adventure. But you know, we used to drive Fords until they failed to keep up with the Japanese, who built much better cars. We switched to imports until Ford finally realized how badly they had screwed up in assuming that Americans would always buy their cars regardless of quality. Ford started building decent automobiles again. And they began to compete. And they are looking pretty good right now. The publishing industry is facing its own crisis today and if it doesn't want to go the way of GM, it had better start taking a look at how Ford managed to get back on track.
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule