Book Publishers Fight Libraries Demanding a New Deal on eBooks (msn.com) 92
2021 saw record numbers of people checking out ebooks from libraries, reports the Boston Globe — 500 million, according to figures from the ebook-lending platform OneDrive.
But some Massachusetts lawmakers want to require publishers to make sure all their digital products are available to libraries — and at "reasonable terms" — because currently libraries pay much more than consumers: According to the American Library Association, libraries currently pay three to five times as much as consumers for ebooks and audiobooks. Thus, an ebook selling for $10 at retail could cost a library $50. In addition, the library can only buy the right to lend the book for a limited time — usually just two years — or for a limited number of loans — usually no more than 26. James Lonergan, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, believes that publishers settled on 26 checkouts after calculating that this is the number of times a printed book can be checked out before it's worn out and in need of replacement.
And that's what happens to a digital book after 26 checkouts. The library must "replace" it by paying full price for the right to lend it out 26 more times.
Lonergan admits that this approach makes a certain sense. Traditional printed books can only be borrowed by one user at a time, but in theory a digital book could be loaned to thousands of patrons at once. Also, printed books wear out and must be repurchased, but digital books last indefinitely. "You can't have a book be available forever at the same price point," Lonergan said. "The publishers need to make money." Lonergan thinks libraries and publishers can work out less expensive and more flexible terms. Publishers might charge a lower up-front cost for their digital products, for instance. Or they might expand the number of times libraries can lend out an ebook or audiobook. Lonergan believes that passing the Massachusetts law would give publishers further incentive to deal.
But the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which represents most of the nation's leading publishers, is ready to fight. An emailed statement from AAP said the Massachusetts bill "raises significant constitutional and federal copyright law concerns and is an unjustified intrusion into a vibrant and thriving market for ebooks and audiobooks that benefits authors and publishers, booksellers, libraries, and the general public."
The AAP has already sued in federal court to block enforcement of the Maryland law, arguing that only the federal government can regulate digital publishing practices.
The head of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners counters that if enough individual states pass ebook-pricing laws, "then Congress will step in and do something about this on the federal level."
But some Massachusetts lawmakers want to require publishers to make sure all their digital products are available to libraries — and at "reasonable terms" — because currently libraries pay much more than consumers: According to the American Library Association, libraries currently pay three to five times as much as consumers for ebooks and audiobooks. Thus, an ebook selling for $10 at retail could cost a library $50. In addition, the library can only buy the right to lend the book for a limited time — usually just two years — or for a limited number of loans — usually no more than 26. James Lonergan, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, believes that publishers settled on 26 checkouts after calculating that this is the number of times a printed book can be checked out before it's worn out and in need of replacement.
And that's what happens to a digital book after 26 checkouts. The library must "replace" it by paying full price for the right to lend it out 26 more times.
Lonergan admits that this approach makes a certain sense. Traditional printed books can only be borrowed by one user at a time, but in theory a digital book could be loaned to thousands of patrons at once. Also, printed books wear out and must be repurchased, but digital books last indefinitely. "You can't have a book be available forever at the same price point," Lonergan said. "The publishers need to make money." Lonergan thinks libraries and publishers can work out less expensive and more flexible terms. Publishers might charge a lower up-front cost for their digital products, for instance. Or they might expand the number of times libraries can lend out an ebook or audiobook. Lonergan believes that passing the Massachusetts law would give publishers further incentive to deal.
But the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which represents most of the nation's leading publishers, is ready to fight. An emailed statement from AAP said the Massachusetts bill "raises significant constitutional and federal copyright law concerns and is an unjustified intrusion into a vibrant and thriving market for ebooks and audiobooks that benefits authors and publishers, booksellers, libraries, and the general public."
The AAP has already sued in federal court to block enforcement of the Maryland law, arguing that only the federal government can regulate digital publishing practices.
The head of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners counters that if enough individual states pass ebook-pricing laws, "then Congress will step in and do something about this on the federal level."
How do we balancer author / publisher / consumer? (Score:2)
This is more of a gene
Re:How do we balancer author / publisher / consume (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more of a general question - how do we balance the needs of remunerating an author, keeping publishers in business, and making works available via libraries?
I read a lot of books (mostly ebooks), and I have to ask - what value do publishers bring to the conversation nowadays? Other than providing publicity, of course. It's seemed pretty obvious for years that publishers don't employ proofreaders and editors anymore. So what, exactly, is their value-add?
Re:How do we balancer author / publisher / consume (Score:5, Interesting)
Having read a lot of self-published stuff on Kindle over the past decade, some of which has gone on to be picked up by publishers and gone “mainstream”, publishers add a lot of value for a lot of writers - editing, proofing, setting etc all have value for an ebook, they arent just old school things.
A lot of the self-published stuff which is picked up by a publisher is improved with good editing - many writers cant really judge if their pacing is off, if theres too much in a scene or too little, if an entire sub plot is just boring etc, and thats where the editor comes in. A good editor can turn a good manuscript into a great book, just by massaging whats there.
Re:How do we balancer author / publisher / consume (Score:5, Insightful)
The value is not provided by the publishing, but the editing. Editing does not necessarily needs to be coupled to publishing rights and an author could theoretically hire an editor while still self-publishing.
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Editing does not need to be coupled to publishing. However, that is definitely what tends to happen. It is much easier to have a critical eye for a manuscript when you are being paid by the publisher, who only makes money if the book is edited to the point where it is a commercial success. If an editor publishes enough books that don't sell well, they end up unemployed. They are also fronting the money, if the author doesn't like their proposed changes then the book doesn't get published. It's as simpl
Re: How do we balancer author / publisher / consum (Score:2)
Speaking as a (scholarly) author, I would add to this that if one has a publisher, the editor has more clout over one: one doesn't feel free to just ignore the editor's suggestions, since they're working for the publisher, not oneself.
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Did Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Joyce, Platon etc. etc. have their books edited by an editor? Yet their works are invaluable piece of art to these days and beyond.
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Did Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Joyce, Platon etc. etc. have their books edited by an editor? Yet their works are invaluable piece of art to these days and beyond.
Many of these authors did have editors, although the process wouldn't have been exactly the same as modern editing. Dickens when writing Great Expectations, for example, had many of his colleagues read and critique his chapters throughout the writing process. Dickens changed his ending after one colleague thought the original was too sad. Mary Shelley did heavily edit Frankenstein between 1817 when she finished it and 1831 when its most popular edition was published (there are multiple versions of the book
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Let's take a look at these one at a time.
Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays and poetry all went through a fairly traditional publishing process including editors. In fact, most of his plays were only published after his death, and there is plenty of evidence that all of his plays had substantial rewrites as they were performed. What we today consider to be "Shakespeare" almost certainly has the fingerprints of any number of actors, editors, and publishers. Shakespeare's poetry, in fact, was published in
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Well, I got some pretty insightful and I believe truthful answers. :) Thank you, chaps. Interesting read. I am a musician who is also into IT and I can relate to all this publishing conundrum easily, no matter the century. Classical musical pieces weren't exactly written completely devoid of some criticism from "mecenas" [most popular compositors had a "mecena" who would be an equivalent of today's producer...
One more thing, I used Plato's Greek name Platon, probably because I like history and philosophy, a
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> Did Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, Joyce, Platon etc. etc. have their books edited by an editor?
yes.
Re:How do we balancer author / publisher / consume (Score:4, Informative)
I do not see publishers providing value these days. Sure, some self-published authors mess it up and it is a learning process, but dealing with publishers is one too and I have read some nice books where the authors had trouble getting them published at all. These days, an author can have proof-reading, editing, cover creation, etc. done by professionals offering those services directly. The publishers have become superfluous and are mainly a problem. Well, not all of them, some have adjusted their business models but these are not the ones wanting more money from public libraries.
Gotta ask yourself (Score:2)
> I read a lot of books (mostly ebooks), and I have to ask - what value do publishers bring to the conversation nowadays?
You said you read a lot of books. Grab two or three you've read recently.
There are a TON of self-published books. Are the ones you read recently self-published? Or did you choose books from publishing companies?
If you chose the books from publishing companies - why? What's the value to you? I know what the value is to me. Only you can answer for yourself why you are buying self-publi
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There is no risk to publishing ebooks, there's almost no cost associated with it in fact. Run the original document through the conversion software, and put it where it can be downloaded. That's it. After that the only expense would be for marketing.
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I'm afraid you're mistaken. Paying the authors and editors costs money. Maintaining the reference library for customers to access the content at whim, to organize the content and to handle people's subscriptions or secure their payment data costs something. Prices have come down quite a lot, but it's still not free, especially if the books need to be secured from malicious attackers, which have been a very real problem for many publishers. It only takes one effective ransomware to deny the public a small pu
Re: Gotta ask yourself (Score:2)
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The value, if you can call it that, is the vetting. The publisher is willing to invest in an author, so there *may* be something to their writing. They allow me to concentrate on a dozen rather than hundreds of candidates. The problem with self-publishing is the lack of a reliable filter. Book reviews are mainly useless because of the endless number of thoughtless people that rate rubbish highly. Until there is some way of doing this, we are stuck with publishers and their antiquated practices of fleecing a
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This is essentially form of marketing. It allows me to find a publication that would have been otherwise effectively buried and never even heard of. In this context marketing adds value not just to the author but to me as
Re: Gotta ask yourself (Score:2)
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Publisher invest in books with the idea that they will pay the author for the rights to the book, then pay to have it edited and marketed, and then in the end they hope they will be able to sell enough copies of the book to make a profit. They front the money for the development of the book.
The reality is that in your case your wife was the publisher. She merely hired out some other company to print the book, and probably to stock an electronic version of the book in a place where it could be convenient
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raymorris stated:
In books, the O'Reilly name, or For Dummies, tells me what I'm getting even before I open the cover. I can know what to expect from Python 6 for Dummies, even before it's been written. The publisher sees to it that it meets the consumers expectations for that brand / imprint.
I have a number of friends who've written popular books on networking for O'Reilly. They didn't even make minimum wage for their efforts. They were already successful columnists and feature writers beforehand, and writing for O'Reilly didn't increase their income from journalism, nor did it affect their income as speakers at trade shows, or on the corporate circuit.
So, although you may have benefitted from the "known quantity" of the O'Reilly imprint, the people who actually did the work go
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It depends on the books. Bringing books from paper to digital format is an error prone process, especially if the original book had many references or illustrations. Keeping the books available 24x7, and ensuring that the digital copies are not lost is another expense done more much more effectively by professionals who won't lose the AWS encryption key or permit their systems to be locked up by ransomware. Editing to help authors expand or reduce their content for legibility, or resolve plot conflicts or h
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They don't really provide as much publicity for most books as you'd think; outside of blurbs that's mostly going to fall to the author unless it's a major release. What you may be thinking of is marketing, but there the targets are buyers at bookstores -- that is the people who work for bookstores and figure out what to stock -- not the general reading public.
Publishers have outsourced a lot, as you are aware, but they have value in knowing who they should outsource to; who is a good, cheap, cover artist,
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It is important to ensure that authors aer able to be renumerated for their or - if the work is worthy of renumeration - but we also need to weigh up the cost of lost works too. Right now, because of the overly long peiods of copyright, there is little chance that a less popular work will still exist by the time it's copyright period ends, so it is lost forever.
In the original way copyright existed, with it being 14 years, t here is every chance that a book published 14 years ago will still be in good enoug
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A simple solution to this is to ditch copyright terms altogether, but tax copyright (and other forms of intellectual property) like we tax real estate. Then copyrights will only last for as long as sufficient profit can be made to sustain them, and content will fall into public domain immediately after.
Better yet, make the tax progressive over time, starting with zero for the first few years (to give author some time to market it), and then exponentially increasing. This would reflect the lost (to the commo
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If authors (and the supply chain) want remuneration, there are plenty of other ways to do it than artificial monopolies, rent-seeking, and royalties.
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If authors (and the supply chain) want remuneration, there are plenty of other ways to do it
Can you list some of these other ways? Can you give some examples where these other methods were used successfully?
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However, work done on commission was for thousands of years the way creative works were produced, and continues to be today, and a form of it has evolved with internet community supported content too (eg, Patreon and similar systems).
Very few will get ridiculously rich with commission based work, but no one is entitled to anyway.
Anot
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One thing that is noticed is that authors of that period wrote in smaller chapters. The chapters were frequently published, one at a time, in the newspapers of the day. This was similar to the syndication model used by many cartoonists today.
I am sure that there were other methods, as others in this thread have already mentioned, this is just the first to s
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* Patrons
* Syndication
* Performing in a live audience (plays, readings, etc.)
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This is more of a general question - how do we balance the needs of remunerating an author, keeping publishers in business, and making works available via libraries?
I would imagine publishers only publish books they expect to recoup the cost on in the relative short term (not over decades), and that most people who are willing and able to purchase the book at the retail price are likely to do so when it is initially hyped vs later.
So I might say give the publisher, e.g., five years to license ebooks to libraries at whatever terms they can negotiate. But after that the library gets at least one permanent free ebook licence for each physical copy they possess. And if th
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I would imagine publishers only publish books they expect to recoup the cost on in the relative short term (not over decades)
Well, yeah, they have to. The vast majority of works will experience most of their economic value immediately after publication in a particular format, and then the value trails off to a trickle. You can see this in the short term -- a morning newspaper can command 50 cents or so in the morning, but by the evening probably no one wants it, and by the next day it has value only to archives and researchers unless something really amazing happened. The longest term is probably movies, though home video, str
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Publishers have always fought against libraries. I think this current stance is not any different. What has changed? Sure, many people are reading ebooks out of libraries, but before ebooks, many people read physical books out of libraries. As with all the posturing about lost music sales over illegitimate copying, a loaned book is not equivalent to a lost sale.
And if the publisher ever stops actively selling copies then the ebook becomes unlimited.
Selling physical books or ebooks? They can easily keep ebooks available for sale.
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It's like food companies complaining that they should charge more for a food bank as it'll feed more people then their product otherwise might have.
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It's like food companies complaining that they should charge more for a food bank
That is a poor analogy. According to TFA, 26 people read a library book. A meal at a food bank doesn't feed 26 people.
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But still, a library is to be considered a public service to aid those in need, not to milk as much money from as possible.
Re: How do we balancer author / publisher / consum (Score:1)
According to the publishers that's the case. However except for the absolute cheapest of paperbacks, most books last significantly longer than that.
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You should be happy then. According to the article:
Democratic State Rep. Ruth Balser [said], “My understanding is Amazon and the other online publishers limit how much of their information is available to public libraries,” Balser said. “My bill doesn’t directly touch the issue of cost. It just says they can’t not sell to libraries.”
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eBooks should be treated just like paper books. Libraries could buy a paper book once, and lend it out as many times as they wanted, but only to one person at a time. If eBooks were treated this way, that would be a good balance. As it is now, eBooks cost far more for libraries than paper books, for the same titles.
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eBooks should be treated just like paper books. Libraries could buy a paper book once, and lend it out as many times as they wanted, but only to one person at a time. If eBooks were treated this way, that would be a good balance. As it is now, eBooks cost far more for libraries than paper books, for the same titles.
It seems reasonable that ebooks should be the same price as paper books or possibly cheaper as there is no printing cost. I also don't like it but it seems reasonable to limit ebooks to the number of copies purchased. If you are buying the ebooks outright, it does seem reasonable to limit their duration but 26 checkouts seems extremely limited as most paper books should last considerably longer than that. A length of time seems reasonable like 5 years but most of the money is made in the first 5 years an
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Your "per checkout" idea seems reasonable, but $1 per checkout seems really high. Music streaming services pay a fraction of a cent per stream, for a song that you can buy for $1. https://freeyourmusic.com/blog... [freeyourmusic.com]
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Your "per checkout" idea seems reasonable, but $1 per checkout seems really high. Music streaming services pay a fraction of a cent per stream, for a song that you can buy for $1. https://freeyourmusic.com/blog... [freeyourmusic.com]
It seems high to me too but I was basing it on the industry idea that a paper book can only be checked out 26 times before being retired.
It's probably a fair price though as it gives a book about $36 of rental fees for the first 3 years which seems on par if not a little better
than what a physical book would earn.
Your music example is not as far off as you think. If you buy a song for $1 and listen to it 100 times, the author makes $1.
At 1 cent per streaming, If you stream it 100 times over 3 years, they s
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You manage copyright durations to a reasonable level. That is why it is such a problem today.
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Libraries aren't a function of a government as much as they are a function of society itself. The invention of a library is older than of what we currently call "government", and it's primary goal is enabling access to education and scholarship to benefit society as a whole.
Now in a country where both aforementioned things are also seen as for profit business, it makes sense to try to squeeze libraries by doing things like pretending that "physical book wears out after less than 30 loans and needs to be rep
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This is more of a general question - how do we balance the needs of remunerating an author, keeping publishers in business, and making works available via libraries?
The question is misleading, and I'll explain why.
Copyright was intended to be a temporary monopoly in order to increase the cultural heritage of society as a whole. Theory was that if you grant this temporary monopoly, it will lead to people making a living off books, and thus publishing more.
For the moment, I'm going to leave aside the fact that evidence that copyright actually increases overall benefit for society has never been presented, and evidence [wired.com] to the contrary [archive.org] has, numerous times [theatlantic.com].
Instead I'm just
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Quote: "how do we balance the needs of remunerating an author, keeping publishers in business, and making works available via libraries?"
Now, I ask you instead: why should we suffer to keep publishers active?
I mean, I didn't see you cry when ticket sellers at metro stations became jobless (tickets were still available to buy).
Here, if publishers became jobless there's still self-publishing, thus books are still available to buy.
In fact, we could solve one big problem when erasing publishers: once the book i
Stable fees for my car (Score:2)
I'm really annoyed that I have to pay for stable fees, hay, and grooming for my automobile. Since cars no longer need those things I don't see why I should pay for them. Likewise yes a digital book doesn't wear out but it also doesn't need to be printed or distributed physically, or stockpiled etc... so how is it remotely possible it should cost more than $10 for a book? Unless the writer and editor are getting nearly the full amount this makes no sense. Some can go to the online store for display an
No Price Fixing Required (Score:2)
I get that libraries don't like paying through the nose for these books, but I'm also wary of price fixing by the government.
There is a simple solution that completely avoids price-fixing. Just require publishers to sell copies to libraries for the same price as they sell to the general public. Libraries do not pay a mark-up on paper books so why should they pay one on e-books? This way the market determines the price and publishers are prevented from separating libraries off into a separate market where they can enormously raise prices over what the broader market can bear.
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One 'Major ship' that sailed (in my opinion) was Amazon not making some kind of deal for "auto-rip" for those of us who bought (sometimes duplicate copies) of physical books.
Another major problem is theft/redundancy/inaccuracy in bringing out of copyright prints to readers.
A good system would have a standards organization for a central format, where texts were distinct to print versions (or print+1 for errata) to get rid of dupes etc. Th
This isn't price fixing (Score:2)
These laws wouldn't need to be price fixing, and almost certainly wouldn't be. They would likely be setting rules around how the price to libraries would compare to the price of the retail version. If the law perhaps said the library price would be five times the retail, the publisher is still allowed to set their retail price.
It will probably be something along the lines of forcing publishers to make all digital books available to libraries, as mentioned in the summary. As for "reasonable terms", it will l
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Many publishers are already struggling
Can you provide a source for that? Based on a quick search, it looks to me like they're doing extremely well. This article [publishersweekly.com] reports that in 2018, three of the five biggest publishers in the US had profit margins over 15%. I couldn't find more recent numbers, but this article [publishers.org] reports that in 2020, revenue from consumer book publishing grew 6%.
100% of the time, price fixing leads to less choice
Citation definitely needed for this claim! Here is an obvious counterexample to disprove your claim: we have long had compulsory licenses [nolo.com] for music at a price fixed
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Keep in mind that the "natural" price of a book is the cost of making a copy. The only reason why it's possible to charge significantly more than that is because of copyright, which is itself an artificial construct created by the government. As such, it can come with arbitrary strings attached, including "price fixing".
As far as having less choice - is that a real problem these days? If anything, we're drowning in content, especially once you include self-publishing. I read every day, and yet my reading qu
For me I would figure out (Score:2)
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Book Publishers (Score:2)
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Book publishers these days are marketers, that is their most important value.
If you can write a book but have no clue how to market it, then you can only hope it will go viral if you publish by yourself.
If you can't write a good book but have a good publisher, there's still a good chance it will become a bestseller with a good publisher. To see this at full-force, think of The Secret and all the nonsense marketing surrounding it. But it made bank.
Purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Copyright's purpose isn't to make money; it's a bargain offering money, for a limited time, to promote the progress of arts. Lengthening copyright to de facto infinity is a perversion of it's purpose. Fuck people who have redefined copyright as the right to perpetual money and access control over text. Nobody "needs" the expansive copyright that exists now. Writing wouldn't cease if we kept to the original 14+14 years-- which should actually be reduced, given the vast difference in cost of reproduction and time it takes to get distributed.
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First sale doctrine needs to work for ebooks as well, especially for libraries.
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Copyright's purpose isn't to make money; it's a bargain offering money, for a limited time, to promote the progress of arts.
More precisely it's a bargain offering the chance to redirect money, for a limited time. Whether a book is popular or not, and whether it makes money or not is based on the market. Copyright doesn't guarantee popularity or profitability. But if there is money to be made, much of it will be redirected toward the copyright holder (or as they direct; they can and often do have to share with others to fully exploit the economic value of their rights).
Also, minor nit, copyright is to promote the progress of s
Writing would Increase (Score:2)
Writing wouldn't cease if we kept to the original 14+14 years
Far from it - writing would likely increase a lot. If libraries and individuals did not have to spend money to get copies of books that were older than 28 years then their entire budgets would be available to purchase new books. Publishers could charge more for books and reward authors more (well we can hope) providing more motivation for authors to write.
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OneDrive? (Score:2)
I thought OneDrive was a piss-poor Dropbox clone turned loose on unsuspecting enterprises with no information architecture forethought.
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I am assuming they meant "OverDrive".
Too bad they didn't have an editor or proofreader to catch such an obvious error.
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Still hasn't been corrected. Pretty ridiculous oversight. In theory, a company could have a trademark on the name OneDrive, but Microsoft would find a way to say that the two products are directly related and would cause confusion.
How do they charge libraries more? (Score:2)
How can a publisher prevent a library from buying a book retail? And if the library does so anyway, how can a publisher possibly detect that it happened?
It seems all we need to do is make sure libraries are able to buy books anonymously, like you and I can. Then the $10 book will be $10 instead of $50. You can't price-discriminate if you don't know which customers you're trying to discriminate against.
Of course it's absurd. All I can think of to resolve it, is that none of the ebooks we're talking about a
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How can a publisher prevent a library from buying a book retail? And if the library does so anyway, how can a publisher possibly detect that it happened?
This is about e-books. Libraries are entirely able to buy retail books and lend them, under the first sale doctrine, which is that the copyright holder has no control over distribution of any given copy after the first distribution.
The problem is that e-books technically aren't distributed (which in the law means that a physical object is being passed around) but are copied because to download it to an e-book reader, or to a library's computer, or whatever, you have to make a copy of it to the destination'
The Law (Score:2)
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First sale doctrine should apply, sure, but that wouldn't help a library. When they loan out ebooks, they still have the ebook. They don't relinquish their own copy until it is returned.
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At once? (Score:3)
> but in theory a digital book could be loaned to thousands of patrons at once.
In practice, an eBook loaned to one borrower at a time. i.e. an artificial scarcity is created to treat them like printed books.
Therefore the fair price of an eBook to a library is the same as a printed book.
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In practice, an eBook loaned to one borrower at a time. i.e. an artificial scarcity is created to treat them like printed books.
Even my 12 year old realizes this is stupid. We tried to check out a book and it said "all copies in use" and my 12 year old said multiple times "but it's an ebook" because it didn't make any sense to her that there was a limited copy of ebooks.
It seems like renting would make more sense for ebooks. Charge something like $1 per month per book to the library for a $25 book. This would allow as many people as wanted to checkout any book they wanted but still fairly compensate the author as $1/month would b
Stupid but probably needed (Score:2)
The elephant in the room (Score:2)
The elephant in the room for books as for film and music is piracy.
The problem is that if content owners raise the bar too much they will incent people to move to piracy and, the real problem, they will make piracy more socially acceptable.
You can compare it to the spread and acceptance of pornography. Whatever we think of it, there has been a profound change in social attitudes towards it in recent decades, its become commonplace and mainstream. Something similar has happened and is happening to piracy.
T
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I run a small ebook publishing company which publishes both on cloud-based services and DRM-free stores , and I don't think you're identifying the right problem.
Piracy is a concern in movies and perhaps in music still, but in ebooks hardly at all. Perhaps it's an issue with bestsellers, college textbooks and IT books, but not most of ebooks being published today.
Fear of piracy is perhaps an issue, and that's why major NY publishers and technical publishers rarely publish on DRM-free platforms like Smashword
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Oh, I thought of another problem. Most libraries are terrible at purchasing ebooks. They get their recommendations mainly from the usual sources like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus, and these are the services which charge authors and authors the highest prices. They buy from NY publishers which can afford to do tradeshows and send quarterly catalogs. That is why public libraries stock a lot of Harlequin romance ebooks and bestselling ebooks from the Big 5 publishers, and not much else. I ha
A classic example.... (Score:3)
I had a classic example of the industry problem a couple of weeks ago. A technically naive neighbor had bought an audiobook from Kobo. She now wanted help figuring out how to listen to it.
I checked. It turns out that to listen to it you have to get an app, which will only run on Android or IOS. And that's the only way you can download and listen.
But, she says, what I want is to use my Windows laptop when I travel. I have music on it and ebooks, so why not this?
Good question. But that is just Kobo's approach.
I looked around and found a free version of this book, its an out of copyright classic, on librivox. I think this is the last Kobo audiobook she will buy.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-emulators-for-pc-655308 [androidauthority.com]
I've used BlueStacks, worked well for my purpose completely unrelated to audiobooks.
Fuck greedy people (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Only 26 loans? (Score:2)
26 loans seems like a relatively low number. That's only 52 weeks (if you loaned it out 26 times at 2 weeks each). I may be an 'older' generation, but I sure thought books lasted much longer. Granted, maybe we just treated them better, and folks outside my region were more rough on their library books in general?
I'm not opposed to some limitations on eBooks/Audio books, I just think that's a low number of loans. They should go with the 2 years, and turn it into a subscription type model. Every 2 years,
Only one limitation is reasonable (Score:2)
I'm not opposed to some limitations on eBooks/Audio books
The only limitation that seems reasonable to me is that at any one time you can only lend out as many copies as you have purchased. While the digital copy may not degrade with time the format can become obsolete and often libraries will buy hardback books that certainly last longer than 26 lends. If publishers want to earn more money from libraries then they need to publish more books.
robbery (Score:1)
Who *need* to make money here ? (Score:1)
"The publishers need to make money."
Do they ?
Imagine a world where authors can submit and sell ebooks without publishers in between.
Not that hard is it ?
On the One Hand... (Score:1)
It's a pity that libraries have to license the ebooks and audiobooks at high rates and keep re-renting the same titles in order to lend them out instead of being able to just buy them once.
On the Other Hand....
Libraries and archives try to have it both ways. Most of them charge "copying" or licensing fees and require you to sign contracts that prohibit you from further or unapproved re-use of even public-domain materials in their special collections. Even for things they have already digitized and even for
How much does publishing a book cost? (Score:2)
Many of the arguments on this thread relate to how much publishers invest in publishing a new book. Here's an example of what it costs to publish a degree-level textbook, which requires substantially more time & investment than a novel & popular non-fiction book. The estimated cost for a 779-page textbook is $80,000 – $130,000 CAD (See: https://www.tonybates.ca/2015/... [tonybates.ca]). It's so cheap in fact, that the university is giving it away for free as an open educational resource (OER), which means th
World Wide Internet Library (Score:2)
Like having your cake and eating it? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)