Amazon and Library E-book Lending

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of  the  uneasy relationship between book publishers and Amazon.com began to unfold last week.  Penguin Books  announced that they were suspending their distribution of new digital books in the Kindle format to libraries. Penguin  and other major publishers will continue to license e-books in Adobe EPUB format, the format favored by all e-reader vendors except Amazon. If you have an Apple iPad, a Sony Reader, a Nook or use any of the readers running Android operating systems, you will be reading EBUB formatted books. If you are using a Kindle, you can only read books in the Kindle format.

The reasons given by Penguin are opaque; they mentioned “security considerations” (whatever that means.) As in all matters associated with e-books,  there are lots of issues and interests at stake in this decision. Let’s try to  ferret out the real back story of all this.

Publishers have always been uneasy about licensing e-books to libraries. They will tell you that they support libraries as the institution in America that creates readers and builds literacy that, in turn, allows  publishers to flourish. Most people won’t argue about this. However with the advent of e-books and e-book library lending programs, publishers are  concerned that this will harm their own  sales of e-books. The reason that they are more concerned about this  than they have been about traditional library lending is because it is so much easier to check out an e-book than it is a physical book, and an e-book is always in pristine condition no matter how many times it is lent out. The reader need not worry about those nasty spots and  unsanitary stains that populate the margins of the pages of a typical library book.  In the past in order to check out a library book, the reader must actually go down to the library and go through the normal hassles, parking, stepping over undesirables, etc.,  in order to be told that the few  titles  that the customer would actually want to read have  waiting lists for the next 3 months. Using the library e-book check out service, you can get a copy of your favorite book while at home  by downloading it  any time day or night.

To be perfectly fair, libraries have managed  in their new e-book services   to recreate every reason that you have avoided   going  to the library in the first place.  I belong to the Oakland Public Library and have availed myself of the service from time to time. And it is convenient when a book I want to read  is in stock and available.  I lie in bed, I hit a button on my new iPad, I get my book. Sweet! However, as with traditional books, the financially hard pressed libraries can only order a limited selection of popular titles and those in  small quantity.  So I still have to wait weeks or even months for the books I want to read.  Of course there  are always lots of books immediately available that are less in demand. In Oakland, most  of these books seem to be  in Chinese or Spanish and accordingly are not of great  interest to me. They have a pretty good selection of Berenstain Bears titles as well.

The e-books  at libraries are being managed by a company called Overdrive. When the programs first began last year, books were only available in the EPUB format and the largest segment of e-book customers, Kindle owners, were not able to participate. Earlier this year Amazon allowed the libraries to license Kindle editions. But  as is  Amazon’s wont, they managed to design the system so that the customer could not just hit a Kindle button on the Overdrive site. Rather they were directed to the Amazon site where there are a myriad of buttons encouraging the library patron to buy the book instead of borrowing it and, while there, to buy a plethora of other Amazon merchandise from cameras to condoms.

This is standard operating procedure for Amazon (and good retail marketing too). Amazon discounts selected items heavily, even using them as loss leaders, to get customers to the website where they then engage in an orgy of buying from Amazon’s vast selection. So Amazon has  been heavily promoting the Kindle library lending program. Sure, it takes away book sales a little bit. But a few lost book sales is a small price to pay for a magnet to bring customers coming back for more stuff.

For now the other major publishers are sitting on the sidelines. Some of them aren’t participating in the Overdrive program at all. Others, like Random House, have responded with even more obtuse comments than Penguin (“We are always evaluating all of our publishing programs.”)

So what does all this mean? For librarians this is about the fact  that they just want their e-books available and don’t want to get caught in a dispute, not of their making,  between the publishers and Amazon. For publishers, already uncomfortable about the e-book library program, this  is about the fact that they don’t want Amazon using free books to drive traffic to their web site to the detriment of e-book sales. For internet gurus and geeks,  this is an example of  the  “legacy” media dinosaurs fighting another losing battle against the brave new world of internet where “information wants to be free”.  For authors this is about whether they have a right to be paid for their work, just like everybody else. (European libraries give authors a small royalty every time their book is checked out. See my previous blog post: Revenge of the Killer Librarians ).

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E-book Wars, Episode 10: Revenge of the Killer Librarians

Your local librarian

Book publishers, take cover. The librarians are at the gate. The issue is, like almost everything else in publishing right now, e-books.

 If you go to your library website, chances are that you will see that it has a new program where you can check out e-books. Cool! Right? Hey, I’ve done it.  It’s free. All you have to do is select the book you want, hit the button, download the book, and voila!

 And you  can avoid the usual inconveniences that detract from the library experience. You  don’t have to go into one of those shabby old buildings , filled up with shabby old people,  and try to find one of those shabby old books. (Who knows what person may have been picking his nose while reading it last?) Furthermore the library rarely has a copy of the book you really want anyway, right?  Sure, if you are looking for  The Muncie Indiana Junior League Cookbook of 1954, you are likely to find one – or more than one. Maybe an old broken spine volume of Funk and Wagnall’s Desk Encyclopedia.  But if you are looking for  Freedom by Jonathan Franzen,  get  in line. You’re number 205 on the waiting list. And when you lose the book,  or maybe your kid cuts it up and makes paper airplanes out of it,  or when you just  bring it back late (which you almost always do), ka-ching!

The new e-book checkout program gets around all that. You do it all  from your home or maybe from the beach in Hawaii with your slick new  iPad2 with 3G .  Hit the button. Read the book. And  if you forget about it, the book automatically gets checked back in after 14 days. No muss, no fuss. No lost books.  No late fees.

 I went to the e-book check out site for the Oakland Library.  It wasn’t perfect. It is, after all, still a library. There were some of the usual library annoyances. The selection wasn’t great and half the titles available were in Chinese. And the books I really wanted were all on hold. But the list is growing, and it’s going to be pretty nifty.

Publishers have been concerned about this and with good reason. These  new library e-book lending  programs, which are all managed by a wholesaler called “Overdrive“,  are so easy that it really is the same experience  as buying one from a bookseller.  It’s just like going to Amazon.com – except no charge.

This week, HarperCollins decided to put the brakes on this. They implemented a new policy where instead of just selling the library  an e-book like they do to bookstores, they will only sell libraries a license to download the book 26 times. That is the estimated number of times that an ink-on-paper  book would be checked out in a year. After that, the library would have to buy another copy. Harper would also impose rules that the libraries could only provide this service to members located in the communities they serve.

The librarians are pissed. They and their knuckle dragging goons are already planning  to punish HarperCollins. They’ve even launched a boycott.  Check out the website. Josh Marwell, Harper’s president for sales pointed out that with the millions of e-reading devices expected to be purchased by consumers in the coming year, HarperCollins decided that the terms of sale of e-books to libraries “if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book ecosystem, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.”

Look, I don’t want to say anything bad about libraries. Just like I don’t want to say anything bad about puppy shelters.  But dammit!  I’m tired of all these people who think that authors shouldn’t get paid for their work. “Ask the Agent” has previously written about the noxious idea that “information wants to be free.” It is a view espoused in books by Internet gurus who get paid quite well for promoting this idea.

The United Kingdom has a curious notion that authors should – well — get paid. In 1979 parliament passed the Public Lending Rights Act   that mandated that authors receive a royalty every time their book is checked out of a public library.  The royalty  amount is 12 cents per check out with a yearly maximum of  about $10,000 US. Other countries that offer some form of compensation to writers for library check outs are: Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Canada, Australia, and Denmark. Civilized societies who honor intellectual labor. And what countries do not pay royalties for library check outs? Libya, Yemen, North Korea, and The United States of America.

Librarians, listen up! It is written. “He who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.”