Last Friday Harper Collins announced that lending libraries that purchase rights to e-book versions of its titles will be entitled to check those titles out to library members only 26 times per purchased title. Many book publishers make some or all of their titles available to lending libraries for check-out an unlimited number of times. Some big publishsers, such as Simon & Shuster and Macmillan, do not make e-books available to lenders at all.
Publishers do not have e-lending figured out yet. It seems to me that placing a limit on the number of check-outs is a valid way to go. I suppose that if we assume that e-books are made available to lending libraries at the same price as paperbacks, the limit number should be set at about the number of times a paperback version of the book can be checked out before it falls apart. To the extent that e-books offer lenders and/or borrowers a benefit over paper copies, the number would be lower than the fall-apart threshold. In the end, the market sets the price of the e-book given its particular set of license privileges.
Is this just a pricing issue, or is there some other principle at play?
How is convenience to be valued?
Related Links: Library Journal
Monday, February 28, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
This statement is incorrect: "there is also the point that e-books can be simultaneously checked out by multiple users, which gives lenders a benefit that they do not have with physical copies." Digital rights management (DRM) imposes a print model upon libraries which means that when it buys a copy of an e-book, its users only have access to that one copy. So, if one reader is using a library's copy of an e-book, another reader must place a hold on it and wait 'til they're done. Again, publishers are already imposing a print model which simulates limited physical access.
This makes sense if, and only if, the licensing fee for an eBook is the same as the cost of a paper book. Somehow I doubt that is the case.
To Anonymous,
Thank you for the correction. I did not know that libraries currently use this "linear" checkout model. Will Harper Collins push this linear checkout requirement even after it has moved to a system of limited check-outs? Seems that it need/shoult not.
Post a Comment