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All Your ebooks are belong to us – for a fee
February 26, 2011
Posted in: Board Member Posts
HarperCollins wants to limit ebook use to 26 times, and then have us pay again. That sounds smackingly similar to a subscription model for content. Well dang, David! Libraries would never subscribe to content. That’s just wrong! You might say.
Oh really? Think about this for a sec. Libraries are already familiar with and are actually using this model. Can you say databases, anyone? In fact, some of us have embraced it. Raise of hands, please – anyone know of a library that has dropped magazine subscriptions because they’re now getting full text access to the same thing through a subscription service?
So yeah – we’re familiar with the model, and it’s working. For that matter, my library’s experimenting with a similar model for music – we’ve subscribed to Freegal, which gives us a certain amount of downloads of music per customer per week.
No – I’m not sure if a subscription model is the right model for all forms of electronic content. But it is a valid, working model … and apparently one that HarperCollins wants to try out (though they unsuccessfully attempted to quietly sneak it in through the backdoor – I think the screen slammed on them).
Are we ready for that model to be used with book-based content yet? I don’t think so. Libraries certainly aren’t ready for that, and publishers and middlemen suppliers (i.e., OverDrive) really aren’t there yet, either. Quite a few things need to change for libraries to adapt to a subscription model for our “big business” item (i.e., books) and away from a purchase-an-item, keep-it-forever model.
Things like this:
- quite a few of our formal policies would need to change – right now, they’re all pretty much written for a “buy the right stuff and keep it forever” model
- assurances that content wouldn’t be yanked for a variety of back office reasons (remember the 1984 Amazon Kindle fiasco?).
- how does the preservation of content thing work with a subscription-based model? Who gets that job? Do libraries let other organizations like the Internet Archive handle preservation issues, and hope they have our backs?
- The whole payment thing. What’s that look like? IIs the cost list price, then after 26 uses, we pay list price again? This is the digital world, and that’s a silly way to price things out. We need a pricing model that’s fair to authors, publishers, middlemen, and libraries. No small task.
- Can we put certain publisher’s content on any device that our patrons bring into the library?
- do we buy devices for patrons? Or assume everyone has a device (um, not), and help patrons with their mired of devices – meaning that we’d need to own at least one of each, so we know how to use them too (which we should be doing now)
- Our current “one check out per digital item” model really needs to be modernized. Justin Keiser said this on Library Renewal’s Facebook wall: “The digital delivery model that libraries should aspire to is Netflix. While watch instantly still isn’t perfect, imagine how successful Netflix would be if only one person at a time could stream a movie”. What’s a better model? Not sure yet. But it’s definitely not the current one.
- We need to somehow be able to add records and point to ebooks in our ILS systems. OverDrive appears to be moving towards that, finally. But that’s just one ebook vendor, and just l ike databases, I’m guessing that all our content won’t come from a single vendor. They need to play nice among themselves, and with our back-end systems.
Again – that doesn’t mean this is ultimately a bad thing – it’s one emerging model among many that might work, or might fail miserably. But I do know this – Library Renewal wants to be there, and wants to help solve this problem.
So help us out – what am I missing in this list? Chime in in the comments please!
pic by hownowdesign
[...] All Your ebooks are belong to us – for a fee by David Lee King at Library Renewal (added 2.26.2011 1:00pm est) [...]
I’ve been watching this whole situation develop, and it seems to me that a potential compromise might be for the publisher to allow multiple downloads of an item, while allowing them to be simultaneous.
The public would appreciate the immediate availability of popular titles. The library benefits because the public is happy.
And if we run through our multiple downloads quickly (or if we know before we order that massive numbers of people are going to want to read this), it acts as a signal to buy more.
When downloads slow for a particular title, we can choose whether to purchase again or to let the item exit our collection automatically when that final download is accomplished.
There are similarities to the express book-rental model for popular titles, where a library rents multiple copies of a title to satisfy patron demand without wanting to add all those copies permanently to the collection.
The issue I have with limited downloads, however, is that the OverDrive model is still not totally dependable. We have people whose download times out in the middle of the process, and after 3 tries at downloading, their claim to that title is cancelled. What will we do for those people, and is it considered 3 downloads, or just one?
[...] I’ve not seen mentioned much in the discussion going on in the library community and in the author and reading communities, has been what about small [...]
Lynne – certainly a possibility. There would need to be some type of threshhold or throttle so libraries didn’t go over their top-end budget amount too fast … but that said, this could work. Good idea!
When I look at journal subscription databases, I assume the cost of paying for a subscription is because it’s a continuing resource, ever changing, always new content added. When it comes to an ebook, it’s a book, it’s a monograph. Why would libraries buy ebooks over print books if they were only allowed to lend the ebook X amount of times before they had to pay again when they can buy the print book and lend it for years to come?
That’s how I see it at least. I have to admit having never used Overdrive to borrow books at the library purely because of the horror stories I’ve heard from patrons and librarians alike, so I have no knowledge of any “added value” given by Overdrive (perceived or actual).
Yeah – it’s just a half-formed thought at the moment. But I see it as much the same – content from ejournals just get added much faster.
Overdrive’s iphone interface, anyway, is much improved – they did a redesign on it, and it actually makes sense now (translation = I was finally able to figure it out).
It seems to me that if the library is basically “renting or leasing temporarily” a digital book from a publisher or vendor — which is really what Harper Collins is offering — then the price should be lower. You don’t get to KEEP the title in your collection; it expires after 26 checkouts. Pricing should reflect the new model, and not be based on the old print model related to purchasing of physical items.
Ha, I love the title of this! There is a Boycott HarperCollins image free for anyone to use at nooknest.blogspot.com/. She only asks that you don’t hotlink.
And we’ve created a facebook event group: HarperCollins Facebook Boycott Page