
E-books at local libraries: a fight between publishers and librarians - ForHackernews
https://slate.com/business/2019/09/e-book-library-publisher-buying-controversy-petition.html
======
tadzik_
> There’s a tension in e-book pricing generally between consumer expectations
> that a digital file will be less expensive than a physical copy and the
> reality that very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the
> physical format

There's more to this than the cost of making a book. As a consumer, a physical
thing inherently has more value than a digital one because it _keeps_ the
value after I buy it. I can lend the book to someone legally after I'm done
with it. I can sell it, trade it, or donate to a library.

With a digital book (or any other digital good) I lose all of that. Since I'm
getting so much less, why should I pay the same price?

The digitization makes it impossible for businesses to control the
distribution of their products, unless they go full DRM and effectively
prevent people from owning the things they buy – but in that case, there
should be no surprise that people don't want to pay quite as much.

~~~
avar
As a consumer, the digital e-book is inherently more valuable than a physical
book.

I often re-read or consult books (or chapters) I've read on a whim. If I had
to e.g. take my library on vacations to do the same thing I can trivially do
on a Kindle I'd need to travel with a minivan full of books.

There's all sorts of other value, like search functions, not having to fill my
house or storage box with books, and avoiding that awkward every-other-page-
sucks while reading a book laying sideways in bed.

~~~
heinrichhartman
I feel exactly the opposite.

I hate reading stuff on screens.

\- It hurts my eyes when I do this for hours.

\- It comes with lots of distractions.

\- Digital Annotations are a PITA

\- Zapping through a book works much better in hard-copy

If I am supposed to spent 1h+ reading your content. You better make sure I can
buy a printed copy.

~~~
mellosouls
If you are reading on a proper* e-reader, eyestrain shouldn't be an issue.

*ie classic Kindle with e-ink or similar, not a tablet like iPad/Android equivalent or the annoyingly named Amazon "Kindle" Fire etc.

Not great for tech manuals, admittedly

~~~
eyegor
Actually if you're willing to pay for it, you can buy 10+" eink screens with
wacom digitizers on top (drawing pen support). They're quite good for tech
papers and manuals because they're a similar size to real paper, no eye
strain, you can draw notes directly on them, and ofc you can cram tons of
papers/textbooks/manuals into something that weighs next to nothing.

Edit: if you're curious, look into the likebook mimas as a starting point.
There are other options, that just happens to be the one I've used.

~~~
uneekname
As a student that looks like exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm never going
to shell out $400 for one when I can get an early-gen Kindle for free. Really
hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.

~~~
pgeorgi
> Really hoping we will see prices decrease for higher-end e-ink displays.

Unlikely to happen: similar to silicon, eink's yield (that is, amount of parts
produced with no errors) goes down quickly (quadratic if not cubic, I forgot)
with increasing size.

A system based on lots of eink chiplets with small enough margins that you can
tile them could scale up, but the margins are also a difficult area.

~~~
eyegor
I don't think the eink part of it has issues with yields since it's
essentially just conductive ink and a suspension of particles, but the fancy
transparent transistors they sometimes use certainly do. The real issue with
eink is the economies of scale will probably never kick in. Most people would
rather have a color screen, or a screen that exceeds 10fps, or something that
doesn't have artifacts like an etch a sketch, etc. There's only 1 oem for the
entire eink panel market (over 6") last I checked.

------
Merrill
Note that pricing of ebooks for libraries is higher than for consumers -
[https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the-
fu...](https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/the-future-of-
ebook-pricing/)

>Among the Big Five publishers (HBG, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, PRH,
and S&S), pricing for one copy remains excessively high, in the $50 range for
two years of library access, compared with the $15 range for perpetual access
by consumers. Four of the Big Five now employ a two-year access model, which
poses challenges to collection development and preservation.

Note also that ebooks come with restrictions that inhibit inter-library loans.

------
meuk
> very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format

Either that's bullshit, or the costs are entirely artificial. I really, really
want "Concrete mathematics" by Donald Knuth. I really, really don't want to
pay €80 for it. A good alternative for me would be the e-book, but it isn't
any cheaper. I doubt if anyone will buy the ebook for that price while there
are free copies available online.

~~~
dgacmu
It's entirely dependant upon volume. According to [0], the average US non-
fiction book will sell under 3,000 copies in its lifetime. For the proceeds
from that to pay the author, editor, and marketing... Well, that's not a lot
of copies to amortize those salaries across.

The numbers are obviously very different for a New York times best seller,
where physical goods costs will represent a larger fraction of the cost. But
most books aren't NYT bestsellers, (even? Particularly?) When they're by Knuth
on advanced topics. :)

you could call paying all of the people involved in the process of creating a
book artificial, but if we don't, we don't get more books.

[0]
[https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1394159](https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_1394159)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Coincidentally, it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book.
So, what, say $1 per book pays for that. The rest pays the author.

But wait! Authors only get a buck or two royalty per book. So why do they cost
so much?

Use your imagination.

~~~
bregma
> it costs between $2000 and $4000 to print and market a book

It costs between $2000 and $4000 to print a book. It costs about the same to
warehouse and distribute a typical hardcover.

It costs maybe $100,000 to market a book. Often much more.

Printing, distribution, and royalties are a small part of costs in the
publishing industry. Marketing and amortized overhead are a large part of the
costs.

~~~
greedo
Most books, especially non-fiction have incredibly small marketing budgets.
Often it's up to the author to self-promote the book.

------
cr0sh
I was just at my local library over the weekend, not having stepped inside one
for a very long time. I was actually there to get my library card renewed, as
I hadn't used it for so long it became out of date.

So, I'm browsing the stacks, and see a few books that look intriguing. But
here's the thing: I don't have time to check them out and read them. There was
a time I could and would do that, but age and responsibilities have cut that
short.

So - I do what any 21st century citizen with a smartphone does - I searched
for them on Amazon. I ended up finding all of the titles on Amazon, but the
kicker was that the physical copies of the book (even hardbound!) were cheaper
- cheaper! - than the ebook (kindle) version.

So - I purchased them; they should arrive at my door in a couple of days. I'll
get to read them at my leisure, I won't have to worry about overdue fines or
anything like that, and best of all - I have physical copies.

Overdrive goes away? Well - I can still read my copies.

Publisher decides to revoke the ebook license? Well - I can still read my
copies.

Long story short: Nothing beats having a unencumbered, non-licensed, non-
encrypted copy of a piece of information (physical or otherwise). Without it,
you are just borrowing it from someone, and they can take it back at will, and
you are SOL.

I'm not sure what it's going to take for people - ordinary people - to
understand this. Maybe the 50,000th time they have to repurchase the "White
Album"?

------
fouric
> If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No.
> 1 fiction bestseller

> Public libraries are engaged in one of the most valuable series of community
> services for all ages, for all audiences

> If you think about equitable access to information for everybody, there
> shouldn’t be discrimination or anything like that

Devil's advocate: the article (and many of the persons mentioned) seem to be
discussing primarily works of fiction, not e.g. textbooks or technical
reference books. How is this part of "a valuable series of community
services"? It seems like they just want the ability to consume more
entertainment media for free, and are trying to disguise it as part of the
(noble) effort of trying to make access to information egalitarian.

~~~
vharuck
To play an advocate from a deeper level of Hell: Why should the ideas in
fiction be dismissed as uninformative?

------
remotecool
It's interesting because these expectations from consumers began with rampant
illegal file sharing in the late 90s.

Many people made the claim that music (and now books) cost nothing to
distribute, so they should get it for free.

The actual cost of creating the first copy is always ignored.

I always thought it was worse than theft because at least when you steal a TV,
the value of the entire product line doesn't decrease.

------
pdkl95
> consumer expectations that a digital file will be less expensive than a
> physical copy

That expectation is justified, because bits haven't been a scarce resource
ever since Shannon's digital circuits drove marginal cost of copying a file to
approximately zero.

> very little of the cost of making a book is tied up in the physical format

If the market isn't willing to pay that price, then their business model isn't
sustainable. Blaming libraries and attempting to make their product
artificially scarce (with rate-limiting contracts or technical tricks ("DRM")
at best only postpone the business model's eventual failure. While it would be
unfortunate if authoring books became unsustainable, the _publishers_ may not
be needed. That's what capitalism does: it removes inefficiency, including
middlemen that no longer strictly required..

> Potash said that studies consistently show library patrons to be more
> frequent book buyers overall—which is another reason Macmillan’s letter
> stung. “They are taking their readers, their customers, their fans, and
> intentionally trying to frustrate them,” he said.

Giving your actual paying (even indirectly through a library) customers a
worse experience than they could get by sim0ply downloading a pirated copy is
always a bad idea. It takes a long time to rebuild from a bad reputation.

However, the bigger problem is failing to recognize that the real competition
is for people's attention. Rate-limiting or otherwise restricting libraries is
throwing away the most important resource: people's awareness that your
product even exists. Do you want free advertising even when people read your
book for free, or do you want fade into obscurity without even the
_possibility_ of making a sale?

> The licensing model for libraries and e-books itself is complex and
> difficult to explain to outsiders.

That's intentional, because they are trying to use complex tricks to
artificially recreate scarcity instead of adapting to a new business model.

~~~
iamtheworstdev
But the cost of printing a book isn't exactly high. Most of the cost of a book
is in the author, editorial staff, and other human services. The manufacturing
is near nil.

------
ainiriand
What is more important, culture or company profits?

~~~
kozak
For a company, it's obviously profits. Without them, the company will cease
existing.

~~~
falcolas
You are confusing profit with revenue. Without revenue, the company will
disappear. A company with revenue to cover operating costs but no profits will
survive, even thrive.

------
80mph
With my local library (Santa Clara county), I've noticed that there is no
requirement to revalidate my local address. After I move away, I would
presumably join my new library, but I'd still have the option to log back in
on my Kobo E-reader using my SCCL membership. I love Overdrive, but I think a
lot of users abuse the system in this way.

~~~
codezero
they don't seem to care. my wife went around to about four libraries in the
bay area so she could get easier access to some books which may not be
available immediately in Santa Clara, but are available in San Mateo. I assume
this is for the reasons stated in another comment: the licensing forbids
individual libraries from sharing their copies with other libraries...

------
Ajedi32
I feel it's only natural for this sort of thing to happen, as ultimately the
purpose of libraries and the purpose of copyright are in direct opposition to
one another.

In my view, the primary reason public libraries were created was to provide
the public with free access to informational and culturally-relevant media
(books, newspapers, movies, audio, etc). Previously, a library's effectiveness
in fulfilling that mission was naturally limited by the need for the library
to acquire physical copies of every article of media they provided access to,
and by the natural geographical restrictions imposed by the need for members
to physically travel to the library to view, check out, and return those
articles. These limitations made it relatively easy for libraries to coexist
with copyright law, as libraries would never be able to compete with the
convenience of personal ownership of a physical copy of media.

With modern, digital media, such physical limitations are no longer present.
Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired and
loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy to
build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so efficiently
and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for personal
ownership of media for the vast majority of people.

Imagine a national library purchasing 100 copies of a movie, then instantly
"checking it out" to you when you stream it to your phone, and "checking it
in" as soon as the movie finishes playing or you pause it for more than a
minute or two. Such a system could be many orders of magnitude cheaper than
our current public library system, while at the same time being far more
convenient. They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of
business overnight. Now apply the same system to books, music, magazines, etc.
Why would any significant number of people bother buying any of those forms
media ever again?

~~~
moate
>>Were it not for copyright law preventing digital media from being acquired
and loaned out the same way that physical media are, it would be rather easy
to build a public library system which would fulfill its mission so
efficiently and with such convenience that it would supplant the need for
personal ownership of media for the vast majority of people.

You've just inspired me. How do we make libraries the next "great disruptor"?

>>They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business
overnight.

All of those services are also primary-content creators. They no longer just
serve as repositories for content, they also produce unique content that adds
value.

~~~
Ajedi32
>> They could put Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Disney+ out of business
overnight.

> All of those services are also primary-content creators.

Right, so they would remain in business only by distributing exclusive content
that's not available in public libraries by virtue of the fact that copies of
those media can never be purchased, only streamed directly from their original
creator.

Thinking about where that would lead in a world where that business model
suddenly becomes extremely profitable compared to selling copies of your
movie... it almost seems kinda dystopian.

------
UserIsUnused
As usual, RMS is right about DRM.

~~~
selimthegrim
RMS unfortunately has picked a different hill to die on these days

------
kilolima
I don't think that libraries should purchase ebooks anyway. The checkout model
translated to a digital file is awkward and un-natural- how does one checkout
a single copy of an ebook? Why can't there be an infinite number of copies?

I'd rather see libraries give up ebooks entirely until there is a non DRM
alternative. Libraries should not reinforce existing DRM regimes. Meanwhile,
it would be great if they could function as the physical location for
furthering the distribution of Free ebooks already in the public domain and
helping to make these available to people, maybe by lending ebook readers
instead! Imagine going to a library and checking out a cheap 2nd Feb Nook
loaded with 1k of Project Gutenberg classics? Or being able to choose and load
the ebooks you want at the library to a device and then taking it home?

------
lost_access
What is the logic behind this? A library e-book can be loaned at most 4 times
during the 8-week hold off period. Are they after the potential four
additional sale? Didn't make any sense to me...

------
fouc
Seems like libraries should team up and combine their purchasing powers to get
more equitable purchase agreements.

~~~
logfromblammo
They should team up and use the existing copyright laws in a way that is more
suited to their mission.

Which is to say they should create their own shared digital-lending
infrastructure that does not depend on publishers supplying the e-books.

That would provide a significant incentive for publishers to be reasonable
enough that public libraries don't cut them out of the loop entirely using the
first-sale doctrine, with books purchased at retail.

------
ozfive
Macmillan should look into putting more covers up on their site for their own
books as to the reason their sales are going down. When you don't have the
motivation to properly merchandise your products its your own damn fault.

------
otroquecorre
Paper books are always better tha ebooks, but in terms of practicity, ebooks
could make your like easier. Lightweight, storing, fonts format... But the top
advantage is the fact that are water resistant.

------
tus88
I didn't know libraries lent ebooks. Seems kind of strange.

~~~
reaperducer
Some (many?) libraries lend out WiFi hot spots so people can have free
internet at home.

When I lived in New Jersey, the library lent out power tools.

The Chicago Public library lends out museum passes.

Libraries are about knowledge, not books.

~~~
ForHackernews
The Chicago Public Library also lends small toy robots for teaching children
about programming: [https://www.chipublib.org/news/finch-robots-land-at-
cpl/](https://www.chipublib.org/news/finch-robots-land-at-cpl/)

------
logfromblammo
It seems to me as though an interlibrary alliance could pool resources to
create their own digitizations of print-version books. They already pay extra
for the library edition of a print book. For that higher price, they are
supposed to get more durable covers and paper. For a more expensive e-book,
what do they get? Self-destructing DRM. Why would _anyone_ agree to that--
especially a library?

If it is legal to lend out that physical copy, what is the difference,
philosophically, between taking that copy off the shelf and placing it in a
reader-proxy robot that can turn pages and focus its camera on them? What is
the difference between that and flipping through static photographs of the
pages while the physical copy is kept in a "digital lending" vault? What is
the difference between that and flipping through pages of OCR-digitized text
that correspond to the photographs? And if the physical copy is permanently
placed in a defunct mine and no one ever has physical access, what prevents
the mine from lending the digital text to any partner library, so they can in
turn lend the single digital copy to a person?

If the publishers want to play stupid games, award them stupid prizes. Buy the
paperback/cheapest edition of the book, shear off the spine, scan both sides
of each page in a machine at 1200 dpi, re-bind the pages (plus paper cover)
into a corrugated plastic cover, catalog it, and put it in permanent storage.
Now OCR the 1200 dpi images, downsample them to 96 dpi, and package the text
and low-res images into an e-book. When a user thinks the OCR made an error,
the low-res image can establish a page and location, and a rectangle of the
high-res image can be delivered from a web interface. The user's guess at the
text content can then be verified or rejected by AI--easier than OCR from
scratch--and used to update the book file.

All the lending software needs to do is verify that no more than N natural
persons are looking at the digital files for N real copies at the same time.
The physical copy could always be retrieved from storage and shipped to the
borrower, after all. The legal copyright model has nothing to do with the time
and money costs of physical shipping. A property title can move faster than
the speed of light, even when the property itself is immobile. Even if the
lending model doesn't work, sell the beneficial interest in the book for
$20.00, and then pay $19.99 when they sell it back, the $0.01 representing
physical-book storage fees and bandwidth costs.

Whether or not the end-user can copy the files they receive is immaterial. I
can already borrow a library book and scan every page at home. That would be
_me_ violating the copyright, not the library. The burden on the library is to
say, "please don't do that, unless it is for legal, fair-use purposes". And
the burden of policing it is on the owner/assignee of the copyright. If going
along with the copyright system voluntarily is reasonable, people will go
along with it voluntarily. If not, people will pirate. This may seem
tautological, but increasing forced compliance will reduce voluntary
compliance.

~~~
shantly
Your scheme requires copying the work, probably several times, and
distributing some of those copies, so it won't fly.

I'm pretty sure the fact that digital lending necessarily makes tons of copies
of the work—consider live server disk, backups (possibly many copies there),
copies in cache across who knows how many devices on the Internet, the copy on
the user's device, copies in RAM all over the place, et c., such that there
might well be twenty copies of a book before it reaches the eyes of a
borrowing reader—is why publishers are able to put license terms on ebook
lending in the first place, since _technically_ the whole process, practically
speaking, involves copying the book a bunch of times.

~~~
logfromblammo
What we know to be a copy by common sense, real world interpretation of the
word "copy" is not necessarily what copyright law considers to be a "copy" for
the purposes of enforcing copyright laws.

Is holding a book up to a half-silvered mirror making a copy of it? Is looking
over someone else's shoulder as they read making a copy? Do the activation
levels in a person's visual cortex count as a copy?

It may be useful to keep hairs unsplit, forget about the quantum mechanics of
copying and focus on the observers. If there are two files with identical
content on a filesystem such that only one user is authorized to read them,
how many copies exist?

To me, that's two copies in fact, but one copy by copyright law, in that the
second real-life copy is not separable from the first for the purposes of
commerce. The act of changing the access permissions on the second identical
file would be what makes it a copyright-copy, not the act of duplicating the
bits.

~~~
shantly
In that case why are libraries bothering with jumping through these hoops and
paying extra money for expiring ebooks anyway?

~~~
logfromblammo
They want to be "good citizens" in the book-publishing ecosystem. They follow
along with the publishers' schemes, to ensure that the channel for public
access to the material remains open.

They don't want to risk the possibility that there might be knowledge out
there that an ordinary person might be barred from accessing via the public
library. And as long as the publishers are reasonable, even when charging a
higher library price, that's cheaper than libraries setting up a different
infrastructure.

The mission of most libraries is about access and public service, rather than
raw price. The publishers can abuse that.

------
Hitton
Usually I'm against restrictions like this, but this doesn't seem that bad.
It's only for ebooks and for first 8 weeks, with people waiting years for the
next book of their favourite author, waiting 2 more months when they are not
willing to buy that book is nothing.

~~~
moate
The book is being bought. The libraries aren't getting these books for free.

If you, private citizen Hitton, want to buy this book the day it's released
and then lend it out to every single person you know, you're able to do this.
Why shouldn't the library?

Also, there are lending limits on e-books from libraries. It's not as if the
library can buy the e-book and then lend it out simultaneously to 20,000
people. They're already required to rate limit how many people can have an
e-book checked out at once.

~~~
rini17
The limit of 1 (one) copy per library described in article seems fully
reasonable to you?

~~~
moate
No, of course not. That's my point. OP is throwing out a "let them eat cake"
argument about how he's fine with this state of affairs. I'm pointing out that
the libraries are buying these e-books in order to lend them out.

Personally I feel that the publishers are misunderstanding their market.
Library people are library people. It's a small, heavy-use userbase. People
who buy books the second they come out aren't going to suddenly become library
people because a few dozen more e-books become available early on. There's
still limits on how the libraries are allowed to lend them (i.e. they can't
buy one book and lend it out 100 times, but they could buy 100 books and lend
those out 100 times).

This feels like publishers are misunderstanding their users, but at the same
time I'm just one user, wtf do I know.

