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silveradeptPenguin (publisher) rescinds its agreement with Overdrive (intermediary that sells e-book access to libraries) because Overdrive offered wireless delivery of Penguin e-books to Kindles through Amazon, something that Penguin says was not in their agreement with Overdrive when they let Overdrive use their books. The American Library Association, the Authors' Guild, and several other companies all provide their input, wanting to have a good model come out of it that makes everyone happy.
While they talk, though, there's a bigger problem that the media is ignoring, even if librarians aren't. Most major publishers aren't signing any access deals for libraries to get their e-books at all. It's not that they're saying "No, we don't like that platform", it's "No, we don't want to let libraries have access to our e-book and e-audiobook catalogues at all."
We have enterprising librarians developing scripts on how to have staff talk to users about the new restrictions as a stopgap measure, but all the focus is in the wrong place. We shouldn't be preoccupied with fighting over whether one vendor should have access to everything. That's just asking for something monopolistic, which will then turn around and bite someone in the ass when the monopoly decides to screw everyone else over for their own profits (looking at you, media cabals).
As things are right now, a lot of library e-book users don't like their current interfaces, and a lot of people who would use library resources, except they find them too difficult to access. Which suggests that there's a giant gap just waiting to be filled.
As Internet Wisdom goes, "Cheap and Easy beats Free and Difficult". As things are right now, we haven't managed easy in anything, only difficult. If, as libraries, we want to get into the e-content delivery, be it academic research journals, back issues of newspapers, or the latest in popular fiction, and we want to be able to send it to devices that people have that are built specifically for reading content (or listening to it), then it falls on us to try and find or design the simplest systems that we can. This gets complicated when you realize that most e-content is not sold, but leased - the owners of the copyright reserve the right to change the terms, add DRM, change DRM, and otherwise hold anyone who wants their stuff over a barrel for access.
How did we manage this sort of thing? Well, we can blame the software companies and their End User License Agreements. You see, with them, when we bought a copy of a program, we didn't actually buy the program. Instead, we shelled out a lot of money for a license to use the program - no reverse-enngineering, no improving, no using it for purposes other than what was spelled out in the agreement. In one notable case, no selling your copy to someone else if you don't want it any more. Thus, we don't own any of the software on our computers. (Mostly. Things like the GNU GPL and other F(L)OSS-type licenses do grant the ability to improve the underlying code, fork it, or manipulate it in ways that most commercial EULAs don't.)
That turned out to be pretty cool for the software companies. People still bought their software, and they retained the ability to dictate how the software was to be used. And then, I'm guessing, someone in another media realm thought "What if we could do this with other types of content? What if I could license people to be able to use music, but not to be able to make copies or share it with others, and to only be able to send it to approved devices that will do what we tell them to?" And thus, DRM music sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And DRM video sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And then resurrected as "streaming" sites where you not only had the DRM, but the would only play under certain plug-ins that didn't offer the ability to make copies or save. (Theoretically.) Which are doing okay in their own right, partially because their revenue streams are not primarily focused on subscription fees, but advertising at all possible places.
Now, however, we find ourselves in a world where, well, as an astute alien mentioned in My Teacher Glows In The Dark, "as technology advances, the technology to fool it advances as well." Technological measures like DRM are confronted with technological measures to strip or break the DRM out and leave perfectly usable files. Through technologies like BitTorrent, legally purchased music, films, and books can be traded across the Internet in relative anonymity. (And with the possibility that those people who want to stop such infringement have to participate in it to be able to see who is infringing.) The digital representations of content are proliferating in ways that their physical counterparts had to deal with decades to centuries ago. (The printing press and the idea of translating into the vulgar language meant everyone could own a cheap copy of the codex of Torah and the Christian Foundational Writings, and thus interpret for themselves, instead of having a priest interpret for them, what it meant. That was a big scandal, remember.) The world out there has both Free and Easy, If Illegal.
Which positions libraries in the place where we were before - as the purveyors of Free and Easy and Totally Legal, Too. How easy would it be for you to check out an e-book from the library, transfer it to your device, and return it if your authentication method was "enter your library card, and we'll send this wirelessly to your device using our public wi-fi." With the added bonus of "Keep it as long as you need to read it, and delete/check-in it when you're done." because the library actually owns the content and can send it out to as many devices as it wants. No waiting list for the latest thriller, because you download it from the library's servers. Content the library buys from magazines and journal archives is always there, even if the library eventually discontinues buying that content, because it's on the library's servers and we handle the authentication methods. Digital music content, movies, and albums available for checkout to your player device - keep as long as you need or until you buy your own copy. (Obviously, some limits would be imposed, but they would be of the nature of "only so much you can check out from us, sorry" and each library could set those limits themselves, rather than being forced to a certain amount by an outside vendor.)
I can see this being more expensive - after all, the publishers want to make a profit, knowing that the library is going to share their content with people who couldn't/wouldn't otherwise pay for it individually. So we negotiate site licensing for content, DRM-free, using our consortia and point out that we do have authentication methods. If need be, we share in the cost of buying server racks, content, and the IT people needed to maintain them, so that small libraries get access to all the big stuff, too. We develop apps and programs to make it easy to get the content, easy to track how much people have, and easy for them to check it back in so they can get something else. And we educate our users on what publishers are doing to them, and we educate publishers about the giant user base, possible sales, and trainloads of money that they could potentially get by licensing to us on our terms and our prices.
Instead of being preoccupied with how we're going to work with what's already out there, why aren't we designing the system we want from the ground up? Why aren't we hammering on the point that Neil Himself makes when he asks "How many of you were introduced to your favorite author by someone sharing a copy of one of their books?" Substitute movies, albums, bands, just about any creative endeavour - how do you know it's good unless you've already experienced it? How do you get more people to experience it? You have to let people share it. Instead of thinking of piracy as lost sales, think of it as the cost of introducing new people to your work. Some of them won't like it and will pass. Some of them will like it, but not enough, in their opinion, to pay whatever price you're setting for them to own it, so they'll borrow and/or steal. Some people will be introduced to something they've never seen before, that they really like, and that they're willing to throw money at to keep it alive and producing more. We have studies that point out people who actively share stuff with others also translate into owning more content legally. In some ways, it's a bit of a code of honor. F'rex, fansubs. It goes something like this: Watch fansubs until the series is licensed. Then, if you like it, go buy the officially licensed series so there's a better chance that more series like it will be licensed and so that the companies that are paying for the licensing can continue to do so. It's a feedback mechanism, and I suspect a lot of licensing companies do actually look at what's being fansubbed, even though they can't/don't admit to it.
Or, for an example that's entirely on the level - Cory Doctorow releases all his books under a Creative Commons license. That means they're free to read on Craphound. And thus, you know what the product is before you choose to buy it in a codex form...or you tell your selectors that this author is dynamite and we need to order copies for the whole library system. He gets sales of his books from people who would not have picked it up in a bookstore, sight unseen. He gets sales to libraries and schools, where people can pick up his book, sight unseen, evaluate it, and then decide whether they want to buy it.
When it comes to digital content, we're preoccupied in all the wrong places, and many of them have to do with a desire to stop someone else from sharing or improving upon what we have done. How much better would everything be if we decided to embrace the idea that people share things, like to improve upon them, and will circumvent stupid ways of stopping this, law-be-damned? For people who are all about The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), isn't this idea of unleashing the creative force what you want? The products will compete, and the best will be funded and sold, and then someone else will improve, and the wheel turns again. For those of us who are about making sure that we leave a rich pool of ideas for the next inspiration, and that inspiration isn't stomped on by restrictive licensing and corporate greed, well, copyright is intended to be a limited monopoly. If we can return it to that idea, we can ensure fertile ground for new ideas. And for those of us in the business of providing to people what they couldn't or wouldn't normally afford, what we've got to do is make things as simple as possible to deliver that content from publishers to the people that want it, and negotiate for fair pricing and ownership so that we can achieve those goals. Let's not get tangled in What Is, excepting as a stopgap measure to What Should Be.
(This is an entry for Shadow Idol, prompt 15: preoccupied. How much of what we do has been shaped and limited by forces that we don't notice, because we're too busy looking at something else?)
While they talk, though, there's a bigger problem that the media is ignoring, even if librarians aren't. Most major publishers aren't signing any access deals for libraries to get their e-books at all. It's not that they're saying "No, we don't like that platform", it's "No, we don't want to let libraries have access to our e-book and e-audiobook catalogues at all."
We have enterprising librarians developing scripts on how to have staff talk to users about the new restrictions as a stopgap measure, but all the focus is in the wrong place. We shouldn't be preoccupied with fighting over whether one vendor should have access to everything. That's just asking for something monopolistic, which will then turn around and bite someone in the ass when the monopoly decides to screw everyone else over for their own profits (looking at you, media cabals).
As things are right now, a lot of library e-book users don't like their current interfaces, and a lot of people who would use library resources, except they find them too difficult to access. Which suggests that there's a giant gap just waiting to be filled.
As Internet Wisdom goes, "Cheap and Easy beats Free and Difficult". As things are right now, we haven't managed easy in anything, only difficult. If, as libraries, we want to get into the e-content delivery, be it academic research journals, back issues of newspapers, or the latest in popular fiction, and we want to be able to send it to devices that people have that are built specifically for reading content (or listening to it), then it falls on us to try and find or design the simplest systems that we can. This gets complicated when you realize that most e-content is not sold, but leased - the owners of the copyright reserve the right to change the terms, add DRM, change DRM, and otherwise hold anyone who wants their stuff over a barrel for access.
How did we manage this sort of thing? Well, we can blame the software companies and their End User License Agreements. You see, with them, when we bought a copy of a program, we didn't actually buy the program. Instead, we shelled out a lot of money for a license to use the program - no reverse-enngineering, no improving, no using it for purposes other than what was spelled out in the agreement. In one notable case, no selling your copy to someone else if you don't want it any more. Thus, we don't own any of the software on our computers. (Mostly. Things like the GNU GPL and other F(L)OSS-type licenses do grant the ability to improve the underlying code, fork it, or manipulate it in ways that most commercial EULAs don't.)
That turned out to be pretty cool for the software companies. People still bought their software, and they retained the ability to dictate how the software was to be used. And then, I'm guessing, someone in another media realm thought "What if we could do this with other types of content? What if I could license people to be able to use music, but not to be able to make copies or share it with others, and to only be able to send it to approved devices that will do what we tell them to?" And thus, DRM music sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And DRM video sites came into being. And crashed spectacularly. And then resurrected as "streaming" sites where you not only had the DRM, but the would only play under certain plug-ins that didn't offer the ability to make copies or save. (Theoretically.) Which are doing okay in their own right, partially because their revenue streams are not primarily focused on subscription fees, but advertising at all possible places.
Now, however, we find ourselves in a world where, well, as an astute alien mentioned in My Teacher Glows In The Dark, "as technology advances, the technology to fool it advances as well." Technological measures like DRM are confronted with technological measures to strip or break the DRM out and leave perfectly usable files. Through technologies like BitTorrent, legally purchased music, films, and books can be traded across the Internet in relative anonymity. (And with the possibility that those people who want to stop such infringement have to participate in it to be able to see who is infringing.) The digital representations of content are proliferating in ways that their physical counterparts had to deal with decades to centuries ago. (The printing press and the idea of translating into the vulgar language meant everyone could own a cheap copy of the codex of Torah and the Christian Foundational Writings, and thus interpret for themselves, instead of having a priest interpret for them, what it meant. That was a big scandal, remember.) The world out there has both Free and Easy, If Illegal.
Which positions libraries in the place where we were before - as the purveyors of Free and Easy and Totally Legal, Too. How easy would it be for you to check out an e-book from the library, transfer it to your device, and return it if your authentication method was "enter your library card, and we'll send this wirelessly to your device using our public wi-fi." With the added bonus of "Keep it as long as you need to read it, and delete/check-in it when you're done." because the library actually owns the content and can send it out to as many devices as it wants. No waiting list for the latest thriller, because you download it from the library's servers. Content the library buys from magazines and journal archives is always there, even if the library eventually discontinues buying that content, because it's on the library's servers and we handle the authentication methods. Digital music content, movies, and albums available for checkout to your player device - keep as long as you need or until you buy your own copy. (Obviously, some limits would be imposed, but they would be of the nature of "only so much you can check out from us, sorry" and each library could set those limits themselves, rather than being forced to a certain amount by an outside vendor.)
I can see this being more expensive - after all, the publishers want to make a profit, knowing that the library is going to share their content with people who couldn't/wouldn't otherwise pay for it individually. So we negotiate site licensing for content, DRM-free, using our consortia and point out that we do have authentication methods. If need be, we share in the cost of buying server racks, content, and the IT people needed to maintain them, so that small libraries get access to all the big stuff, too. We develop apps and programs to make it easy to get the content, easy to track how much people have, and easy for them to check it back in so they can get something else. And we educate our users on what publishers are doing to them, and we educate publishers about the giant user base, possible sales, and trainloads of money that they could potentially get by licensing to us on our terms and our prices.
Instead of being preoccupied with how we're going to work with what's already out there, why aren't we designing the system we want from the ground up? Why aren't we hammering on the point that Neil Himself makes when he asks "How many of you were introduced to your favorite author by someone sharing a copy of one of their books?" Substitute movies, albums, bands, just about any creative endeavour - how do you know it's good unless you've already experienced it? How do you get more people to experience it? You have to let people share it. Instead of thinking of piracy as lost sales, think of it as the cost of introducing new people to your work. Some of them won't like it and will pass. Some of them will like it, but not enough, in their opinion, to pay whatever price you're setting for them to own it, so they'll borrow and/or steal. Some people will be introduced to something they've never seen before, that they really like, and that they're willing to throw money at to keep it alive and producing more. We have studies that point out people who actively share stuff with others also translate into owning more content legally. In some ways, it's a bit of a code of honor. F'rex, fansubs. It goes something like this: Watch fansubs until the series is licensed. Then, if you like it, go buy the officially licensed series so there's a better chance that more series like it will be licensed and so that the companies that are paying for the licensing can continue to do so. It's a feedback mechanism, and I suspect a lot of licensing companies do actually look at what's being fansubbed, even though they can't/don't admit to it.
Or, for an example that's entirely on the level - Cory Doctorow releases all his books under a Creative Commons license. That means they're free to read on Craphound. And thus, you know what the product is before you choose to buy it in a codex form...or you tell your selectors that this author is dynamite and we need to order copies for the whole library system. He gets sales of his books from people who would not have picked it up in a bookstore, sight unseen. He gets sales to libraries and schools, where people can pick up his book, sight unseen, evaluate it, and then decide whether they want to buy it.
When it comes to digital content, we're preoccupied in all the wrong places, and many of them have to do with a desire to stop someone else from sharing or improving upon what we have done. How much better would everything be if we decided to embrace the idea that people share things, like to improve upon them, and will circumvent stupid ways of stopping this, law-be-damned? For people who are all about The Market (A.P.T.I.N.), isn't this idea of unleashing the creative force what you want? The products will compete, and the best will be funded and sold, and then someone else will improve, and the wheel turns again. For those of us who are about making sure that we leave a rich pool of ideas for the next inspiration, and that inspiration isn't stomped on by restrictive licensing and corporate greed, well, copyright is intended to be a limited monopoly. If we can return it to that idea, we can ensure fertile ground for new ideas. And for those of us in the business of providing to people what they couldn't or wouldn't normally afford, what we've got to do is make things as simple as possible to deliver that content from publishers to the people that want it, and negotiate for fair pricing and ownership so that we can achieve those goals. Let's not get tangled in What Is, excepting as a stopgap measure to What Should Be.
(This is an entry for Shadow Idol, prompt 15: preoccupied. How much of what we do has been shaped and limited by forces that we don't notice, because we're too busy looking at something else?)
