I don’t have a lot of time to go into it, but Publisher’s Weekly just came out with an article about a recent webcast on ebook distribution for small publishers. Here at MonsterLibrarian.com, we see a lot of requests to review ebooks, requests from small presses, and requests from small presses issuing titles as ebooks. Distribution is a major problem for them, since many don’t have the funds to get their titles listed in wholesalers’ databases. So, if you are a small press dealing with ebooks, or think you might go that direction soon, you might want to check this webcast out. It is available free for one week. Hope that helps you all out!
What’s The Big Deal About Seth Godin?
A writer named Seth Godin wrote a blog post called “The Future of the Library” . Honestly, it didn’t say anything new. He wrote that the model of the library as a warehouse for books isn’t working anymore. In a lot of places, it isn’t. That doesn’t mean libraries shouldn’t or won’t have print books. It’s just not enough. Why do you go to the library? Do you go sometimes to check your email, play World of Warcraft, or write up your resume? You need a computer for that. Maybe you’re one of the few people who don’t have a DVD player- you can find VHS tapes at the library. Going on a long drive? You could pay awesome amounts of money for an audiobook you might listen to once, or you could go to the library. Librarians are working hard to get publishers to allow them to offer ebooks because there are taxpayers in their community who demand it. Have any of these other formats made paper books obsolete? I don’t think so. Offering new ways to consume (and now produce) information isn’t going to change that. Libraries already do that. Okay, maybe they don’t arm the librarians with soldering irons.
In the school library, and that’s where I worked most recently, the kind of librarian he describes is the kind we aspire to be. The kind who encourages kids to become subject experts who can share new information with not just their peers, but with everyone. The kind who gives kids tools and time and opportunity to create YouTube videos and Scratch programs. The kind who collaborates with teachers, parents, administrators, and kids to create the best learning environment possible. The kind who integrates digital and media literacy into the curriculum. School librarians and public librarians are in different environments, but no matter what the environment, the job we have is to support our community’s needs by giving them all kinds of access to the kinds of information they want and need. Part of that is flooding them with books to create engaged, literate readers, but that’s the beginning, not the end.
At Agnostic, Maybe, Andy Woodworth offered a response that I think did a better job of addressing the issues in Godin’s post. He wrote,
“We are in tune with an emerging sharing culture. We strive for information access for our constituent communities. We work to put books in hand, answers at fingertips, and ideas in minds. And we’ll dance with The Devil to make it possible. “
Darn right.
Honestly, I don’t think Godin knows much about what’s actually going on in libraries today. His vision of the future library is not radical- it’s already happening in a lot of places. In fact, a futurist came to a donors’ event at my own public library and said many of the same things (I didn’t like him much, but he’s already proved to be right on some things). Whatever errors or annoying remarks Godin made (I am not a “data sherpa” or “conceierge”, thank you very much) his final point, which he repeated multiple times, but which I think was lost in the shuffle, is one that I really appreciate, especially now as librarians are actually on trial for their jobs (see below for my post on that)
“We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture”.
So there.
Why boycott HarperCollins?
Well, I’m late to the party with this news, but better late then never. HarperCollins has instituted a new policy of selling ebooks to libraries. After 26 checkouts, an ebook license will expire and a new license for the same book will have to be purchased. HarperCollins apparently came up with the number 26 because that would be equal to a year’s worth of two-week checkouts. Maybe in some places, books get used up and thrown out after 26 uses, but in my personal experience, unless it’s seriously damaged or out of date, I put it back together the best you can and put it back out on the shelf. The school library I worked in had a great budget for a school its size, but I could have been paying for two licenses or even three for the most popular titles, at the rate that kids checked in and out. That would have left a lot of holes in the offerings I could make, both in fiction and in nonfiction. So… there are a lot of librarians, readers, and even authors, who are vocally unhappy about this. Some are going so far as to boycott HarperCollins. This is actually quite a job, since HarperCollins owns many, many imprints.
Now, I get that publishers are in it to make money, and they see library checkouts as lost sales. With individual purchases of ebooks, you basically have one reader=one book. It’s simple to see the impact on sales. But libraries are a different matter. Libraries lend. There, you have many readers who can read the same book (which they are reading instead of buying) so publishers see those as lost sales (even though the library user might go out and buy the book afterwards if she likes it enough to want to read it 26 times).
The result of the idea that libraries get in the way of sales means that it is really difficult to get ebooks from the library. If you have a Kindle, you’re out of luck- Kindle books can’t be lent by libraries. If there’s an author you like who’s published by Macmillan- well, they don’t sell ebooks to the library market at all. It is, however, an incredibly wrongheaded idea. Libraries create and enable readers, and those are the people who are using Kindles, Nooks, and the other various ereaders out there. Nonreaders don’t use ereaders, It’s time for publishers to wake up and see that libraries are the ones creating their customers.
Libraries already face stringent budget cuts. Many are struggling for survival. This isn’t a library-friendly policy. But I question whether it’s really a good idea to boycott HarperCollins. Their imprints serve some pretty big groups of readers- romance readers, children’s books- and for a library to boycott HarperCollins (and some are even pulling print titles as well) denies something that every librarian knows is vitally important- and that’s accessibility to their community. It makes me really angry that HarperCollins is pulling this, limiting access to ebook titles , and obviously changes have to be made in the relationships major ebook publishers have with libraries (here’s a very intelligent post at EarlyWord, “Towards a New Model of Ebook Circ in Libraries”). But a library boycott is not the answer. However, you personally can make a difference by boycotting HarperCollins ebooks and by writing the CEO at HarperCollins on the behalf of libraries and ebook users (maybe you are one) with the aim of doing what we try to do here at MonsterLibrarian, which is to connect people with books, in whatever form they take.
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