Civic Duty...

Important, but really, really disruptive.  Having just spent a week and a day with a dozen of my peers sitting on a jury, I have a renewed appreciation for our justice system.  It is truly a fascinating process.  Sometimes tedious, sometimes baffling, but orderly, fair, and based utterly (from a juror's perspective) on weighing facts presented against the law as explained by the judge.  However fascinating though, it put me behind at work to a degree that will take me weeks to pull back even.

Back in the library world though, one of my fears for ebooks seems to be coming true.  The publisher HarperCollins has decided that they want to pretend that ebooks are the same as paper books - but only in very specific ways.  These specific ways are tied directly to their financial bottom line to the harm of us all.  Am I being melodramatic?  Possibly.  But I think that my fear that publishers were trying to steer the written word toward the licensing model used for software is coming true.

You see, HarperCollins has just discovered a key fundamental difference between paper books and ebooks and realized that , "Woah, this could hit us in the wallet!", though I have doubts about the wallet part.  HarperCollins has realized that ebooks have the potential to last forever.  Therefore, they have changed their DRM scheme so that ebooks purchased by libraries "wear out" after 26 checkouts.

In practice, that means a service like OverDrive, a service to which we subscribe, will charge us every time we have a 27th borrower wanting to download an ebook.  That means every time a patron downloads a book but decides it's not for them and deletes it from their reader, the library has lost 1/26th of the use of that book, even though it was never read.  What if a patron downloads it and never even transfers it to their reader?  Still a lost 1/26th of the book for the library.

Consider the number of times you have been to a library, checked out a number of books and returned a few because after browsing them or attempting to read them, for one reason or another you decided it wasn't the book for you. Is it reasonable to assume that those unread or partly read books have had 1/26th of their useful life consumed?  I don't think so.  In fact, I think that the majority of our paper books, even with the crummy bindings that pass for "library binding" these days last longer than 26 circulations.  I looked up a random copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and looked at its use statistics.  It was added to the collection in 2005 and has since circulated 46 times.  Under HarperCollins new model we would be looking at purchasing a third copy in the very near future if it were an ebook.

In my opinion, this is the final step in turning the "book" into purely a commodity where previously it was a medium to store the accumulated wisdom of civilization as a whole.  Still too melodramatic?  Perhaps.