Tag Archives: ebooks

The subscription model in the book industry: then and now

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Today, nearly everything is available on subscription. The subscription model entails selling a product or service for a recurring price. Depending on the company and product, the bill can be paid every month, every year, or some other interval. The book industry used a somewhat different subscription model beginning in the 17th century, where authors could raise the money to print their books before publication. It amounted to an early version of crowdsourcing. Selling e-books requires a different business model than selling printed books. The publisher has one master copy of the book, which it makes available to customers’ e-readers. When they sell to libraries, they have imposed a new subscription model that essentially rips off libraries and, in the case of public libraries, tax payers. Where did it come from and what are libraries doing about it?

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Why you have to wait for ebook best sellers at the library

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Have you ever eagerly looked forward to the publication of a new book? If the publisher expects it to be a best-seller, you won’t be alone. Your public library will order as many copies as it thinks it needs to let as many people as possible check it out. But if very many patrons want to read it as an ebook, most of them will likely wind up on a waiting list. What’s the difference? For one thing, the library can buy dozens of copies of a printed book. A patron checks one out, reads it, and returns it. It can’t buy dozens of copies of an ebook. The publisher has the one master copy. Every transfer of an electronic file creates a new file. An individual customer can’t easily make a copy of that copy for someone else. But when a library lends an ebook, it puts a new copy on a reading device. At the end of the loan period, that copy disappears. Logically, it would seem, deleting the digital copy should have the same effect on the publisher as returning a physical book to the library. Publishers don’t see it that way.

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Borrowing from a digital library

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I have written numerous posts about the general concept that libraries are about more than books. That doesn’t change the fact that libraries are still very much about books. It’s just that nowadays, an increasing number of titles are available as ebooks. Or quite often, only as ebooks. Libraries lend ebooks. And audiobooks, for that matter.

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Libraries, ebooks, and the freedom to read

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Libraries have long championed its patrons’ right to privacy. The American Library Association first adopted a document known as the Library Bill of Rights in 1939. Basically, it states that whatever anyone chooses to read is no one else’s business, and there is no good reason for the government or any other entity to interfere. Much more recently, librarians eagerly pursued means of lending ebooks to their patrons, only to find unexpected incompatibilities between doing so and freedom to read. Libraries and privacy Every once in a while, some spectacular criminal act will have people suggesting that maybe the police should go to the library and find out what the suspect has been reading. Actually, that’s impossible. Libraries have never kept such records. It violates the entire concept of freedom to read. When someone borrows a book (or anything else), the library’s computer has a patron record for him that includes contact information and his library card number. It also has an item record for everything in the collection. The process of checking out a book basically creates a link between the two records. The public, looking in the catalog, will see that someone has the book checked out and … Continue reading →

Ebooks and libraries

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How can a library add ebooks, something with no physical existence, to its collection? And why would it? I can answer the first question easily. Libraries, like everyone else, have to pay for ebooks. An ebook goes through the same process as any other library material. Someone decides to acquire it. The acquisitions department orders it from the publisher and pays for it. The cataloging department describes it and puts the description in the catalog. Once it’s in the catalog, the reference department can call patrons’ attention to it and the circulation department can check it out. Of course, no one has to mark it, label it, or put it on the shelf. The difference between someone buying an ebook and borrowing it from the library is that the borrowed copy disappears from their ebook reader when the loan period expires.

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