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Publishers Worry as Ebooks Fly off Libraries' Virtual Shelves:
After the pandemic closed many libraries' physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March, boosting its membership by 20 percent.
[...] But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry's big-five publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time—two years, for example—or number of checkouts—most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period.
The result: Libraries typically pay between $20 and $65 per copy—an industry average of $40, according to one recent survey—compared with the $15 an individual might pay to buy the same ebook online. Instead of owning an ebook copy forever, librarians must decide at the end of the licensing term whether to renew.
The rising demand for digital materials has prompted some librarians to shift what they buy, even as they fear shrinking budgets amid the economic downturn. A recent survey of 400 librarians in the US and Canada found that one-third are spending less on physical books, audiobooks, and DVDs, and more on digital versions since the pandemic began. Twenty-nine percent have had their budgets frozen or reduced.
But the publishers' licensing terms make it "very difficult for libraries to be able to afford ebooks," says Michelle Jeske, director of the Denver Public Library and president of the Public Library Association. "The pricing models don't work well for libraries." Between January and July, the Denver system saw 212,000 more books downloaded than the same period last year, a 17 percent increase.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @04:24AM (7 children)
Copy protection lengths is a threat to the public domain. The threat is that many works would have no remaining copies to freely circulate by the time they reach the public domain.
All of these other threats that IP extremists complain about? They pale compared to this. I do not care about those threats until this one is fixed first.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 05 2020, @04:36AM (6 children)
I can't find it in me to give the smallest of damns about threats to publishers. Or "rights holders" in general.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @04:42AM (5 children)
Kill "lending", and users will have an impetus to learn about Library Genesis and other sites publishers hate.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Monday October 05 2020, @12:14PM (4 children)
Yes, let them make it harder to borrow. We need more book torrents; especially audio books.
We should do what Russians did. They digitized and made available all the books ever written in Russian, including all the major editions. Not just a scan, but scan, character recognition, and proofreading by multiple experts. The quality is on academic level. That's a community effort and access is for community members in general. However, a torrent with the whole database is available to install the service locally.
That's how one gets educated population.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @12:56PM (3 children)
Sufficiently advanced machine learning can create an audio book from text. Probably trained on existing audio books.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @03:38PM (2 children)
This may be true, but get back to me when it can flawlessly recreate the vocals of the actors usually hired to read audio books and, importantly, when machine learning is capable of interpreting the text and adjusting the vocals in a nuanced and apposite way, as actors do...In other words, when machine learning can read out 'The Importance of Being Earnest' and can at least match Edith Evans when it comes to the handbag line..give me a call..I'll be figure skating in hell.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @05:12PM (1 child)
Check back in a decade. Hell is coming to an Earth near you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @10:24PM
Decade?, I'm living under the regime of Boris the Buffoon and his cronies...it's already here.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @04:45AM (10 children)
What a load of horseshit. I guess publishers only tolerated physical libraries because it was still somewhat inconvenient to actually go to the library, pick up a copy of the book, then return it when you had finished reading it. They will, of course, fail to mention the reduced cost of producing a e-book or the reduction in the second hand book market that comes with many e-books.
(Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Monday October 05 2020, @05:51AM (9 children)
It's funny, but the "reduced cost" of e-books is actually minor. The actual manufacturing cost of a typical paperback is under a dollar, and a hardback is maybe a couple of dollars. Colour, special paper, foldouts, etc. might raise that slightly but not by much. Shipping and handling might add another dollar per copy. The majority of "costs" is in the initial writing, editing, and formatting, and middleman markups.
A typical mass-market $10 book might typically have the following breakdown:
Author (writing) <$1
Publisher (editing, formatting, promotion) $1 - $3
Printer (manufacture) <$1
Transport, handling, wholesale and retail markups ~$5*
*it's difficult to separate these out, generally performed by the same companies and not really my field.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday October 05 2020, @06:03AM (8 children)
Printing and distribution costs are only relatively scalable, and tend to plateau per unit. But the "costs" (if there was such a thing) of writing, and editing, et cetera are sunk costs, so they marginally reduce with the number of copies utilized. With electronic texts, the infrastructure replaces all the physical costs, and will at some point reduce the margin of sunk costs to zero, or the Public Domain.
Unless, of course, the book is a turkey or a vanity project, in which case it should have been either strangled in the crib, or as Karl Marx once said, " abandoned . . . to the gnawing criticism of the mice", or the virtual equivalent of mice, REddit, no doubt.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday October 05 2020, @06:31AM (7 children)
Yes. Printing is a shrinking commodity market. Margins are razor thin. Much of it has also been automated to reduce setup costs. Any print run over a few thousand is going to have a similar unit cost.
There are a couple of minor steps in the cost/unit, going from digital to offset (~1000 copies), going from sheet to web, ( ~20,000 copies). If you can afford to wait, you can outsource to Asia and get even cheaper printing.
Generally the rentiers will simply increase their profit rather than drop prices.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday October 05 2020, @08:25AM (6 children)
Exactly. But costs are not price, and profit has nothing do with costs, unless there is an artificial monopoly. This is why I advocate total and absolute piracy. Borrow the etext from your public library. Break the encryption, make a copy, unencumbered by DRM. Hell, make a million copies, for your closest million friends. Then recode the original file, and dutifully return it to your public institution, with no restrictions, or time bombs, or remote retrieval capabilities. It is in the public interest.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 05 2020, @12:54PM (5 children)
Nah. I prefer to make sure my favorite authors continue making bank enough to not have to get a day job. If that means some suits get some money as well, oh well. Doesn't mean I won't grab an ebook copy before the far superior dead tree version gets delivered though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @05:20PM
No one asked you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday October 05 2020, @08:59PM (2 children)
I too prefer my authors to be able to continue writing instead of slaving away at quite different day job.
I buy ebooks.
And if I decrypt them it is only as a defense against future failure of ebook reader availability.
I do not redistribute. If a book is worth decrypting it is worth paying for.
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Monday October 05 2020, @09:52PM (1 child)
I agree with supporting authors and editors, but I don't like DRM. Most of my e-books are from Baen Books or direct from authors websites. Quite a few from Gutenberg too.
My main point was that the focus on the supposed "cheapness" of e-books because of no physical manufacture was misplaced. The author and editors still have to do exactly the same amount of work, the typesetter now has to do more, and the print savings are small.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday October 05 2020, @11:41PM
Tor also sells DRM-free books.
But be warned. The same books sole DRM-free are sold with DRM by other publishers (in the case I encountered, in other countries, but there was some confusion whether particular book's Canadian rights were held by Tor of some British publisher.).
Tor (who did have Canadian rights) was so kind as to email me a DRM-free copy after I reported this to them. And they complained to my ebook seller.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday October 06 2020, @04:10AM
Then send some bux to the author. Otherwise, the suits will take the lion's share for themselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Taibhsear on Monday October 05 2020, @07:41AM
Adapt or die. The future is now, old man.
So tired of greedy old bastards holding back technological and societal progress to keep the spice flowing.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday October 05 2020, @08:04AM (3 children)
This is exactly the kind of absurd branch of digital industry, not adding a value to anything.
Also, it will have consequences: certain knowledge and experience will be completely lost to future generations when related digital ebooks cease to be, by power of marketing.
It grieves me this is the intended purpose of the current societal model.
Pure digitalism is destructive.
When you get an ebook, if it is important to you, print it. Give copies to friends. This is how samizdat worked under totality of any ideology.
If it is not printable by platform rules, hack it.
This is not about some funky ephemeral intellectual rights, those having nothing common with intellect, but only with greed and denial of information.
This is about future of humanity.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday October 05 2020, @09:47AM (2 children)
How long does it take you to get to the local library to borrow, the local bookstore to buy or the local post to pick up the order? eBook readers let you carry around a whole bunch of books for when you're waiting in line to the dentist or whatever... They may have built-in dictionaries and search when stumbling on local vernacular you're not familiar with... They may have online search for meta film or book references you want to look up...
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday October 05 2020, @10:19AM
I enjoy my ebook reader the very way you describe. It's an iriver, without any network chip, USB only device.
I wouldn't tolerate anyone deleting my ebooks remotely, as contemporary ebook readers often do.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday October 05 2020, @10:47AM
Not very long. It's on my normal walk route. I don't have a need to carry a whole library with me. I tend to read just a few books at a time -- it's normally the backpack-book, the couch-book and then there might be some work related books. So when at the doctors office or whatnot I just read what is the current backpack-book. When I'm home resting it's the couch-book etc.
Anyhow. So it just takes, less then, one renewal of the e-book to make it more expensive then the hardback paper book? Plus once you own your copy you own your copy. It does have it's limits (only one reader at a time) which is what the digital book was supposed to solve -- but it doesn't. There shouldn't be any limits on how many people can access the same book at the same time. But they instituted that and charged per "book" anyway. Queue system for ebooks is retarded. So I guess the only upside to the ebook over the real book is that it doesn't take up physical shelf-space, it won't be collecting dust and the library doesn't eventually have to decide which books they remove from the shelf and put in storage or destroy/get rid off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 05 2020, @09:23AM (3 children)
OK, just let the publishers be responsible for the license as it should be. An inaccessible e-book? Should be impossible. My CD got scratched after 20 years? Replace please! Now we have a real master-slave relation here. Publisher may do everything, even break own rules, while users can do nothing, even when something is guaranteed in agreement, publisher can just say "We won't do it, sue us".
And one more thing:
Publishers demand compensation because COVID.
Hotel owners demand compensations because COVID.
Transport and "tourism" agents too.
Similarly, E-learning platforms started to require courses to be performed at specific time, which is an absurd in the Internet which has a storage capability.
Where was the government when organ players started to use electric motors instead of people who operated air pumps? did they get compensation?
Or people who lit gas lanterns?
Hackney drivers?
Cat drowners?
Locomotive stokers?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 05 2020, @09:03PM
When the cat drowners contracts expire, do the cats come back to life?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 05 2020, @09:09PM
Absurd if it's just online access to stored data.
Reasonable if it involves interaction with a live instructor, even if only to get answers to questions the student raises when reading the (online or not) text.
I have found it very useful to be able to ask an instructor questions when either I fail to understand something in the lecture, or get excited about some topic only suggested by the actual course content.
I have, on occasion, corresponded with authors for this reason.
- hendrik
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 05 2020, @09:12PM
I like riding in steam trains. Lots of huffing and puffing, clouds of released steam ... Fun.
What we need nowadays is electric steam trains!
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 06 2020, @09:08AM
Fuck publishers with a fork, legally speaking.