ALA, Publishers Go to the Table
One bit of good news from ALA Midwinter is that big publishers will finally be sitting down to some serious discussion about eBook lending. At the end of this month Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin will be meeting in New York with ALA to broach the topic in—we hope—civilized fashion. At this point, none of the three publishers allow public libraries to freely circulate digital copies of their books, although at Penguin the restriction only involves new releases, and this particular impasse is getting old, to say the least. It’s very clear that ALA officials think so, and it’s hard to imagine that publishers don’t feel the same, no matter that they’re the ones holding the higher cards. Nobody’s going to be happy moving forward until some sort of working model is hashed out, and a meeting like this one will be a step forward.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, ALA executive director Keith Fiels talks about how the issue finally got pushed to the forefront, and some of what he’d like to see come out of the proposed meeting:
To the vast majority of people in the middle, and certainly, to the rest of the 99%, libraries play a really important role in creating equitable access. And the decision not to offer equitable access, not to make something available to libraries, is to deny fundamental, basic access to information. So, you asked about the carrot and the stick. I think it is very important to realize that we are not too far from the point where the media is going to figure out that this is an issue. Now, we’re very much eager to do anything we can to facilitate publishers making works available to libraries.
Fiels’ tone is pretty hard to miss; he comes on strong all through the interview, which only serves to play up the picture of libraries at a disadvantage in this standoff. I’m sure the idea of making this a legal issue has come up many times in the past year, and I deeply appreciate ALA’s hard stance on freedom of information. But I don’t know that he’s doing the cause any favors when he tacks on statements assuring us that, never fear, ALA is on the offensive here—
Let me be clear, when we talk about having a dialogue, it is, “Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, you need to start making e-books available to libraries. Now, let’s have a dialogue.”
The us-and-them state of affairs is pretty well established by now, and I doubt dwelling on it accomplishes much—and that’s considerably ratcheted down from his statements to Library Journal, where he calls publisher noncooperation “potential criminal liability.” Then again, a passionate ALA is an effective ALA, so maybe this is just a case of everyone playing out their respective roles.
I’m also curious about the equitable access for the 99% he holds up as a gold standard—exactly what proportion of the 99% are they shutting out by not making eBooks available to borrow? Which is to say, how ubiquitous are eReaders at this point, and are the numbers generous enough to hinge an argument on? I probably should have those statistics at hand, and perhaps they’re ephemeral enough not to really matter—I can remember when video games were rich kids’ toys, and that changed quickly enough. Presumably a discussion about freedom of e-reader information will float all future boats.
Fiels commends Random House for their cooperation, alone among the Big Six publishers, as well as many independent and university presses. And he gets into concerns of formatting a bit, and licensing vs. ownership, which I think are going to come out as the really crucial issues. He has a good point about libraries serving publishers as the archivists of digital information, which is one of the stronger justifications I’ve heard of for ownership. Aside from the other one where it just makes more sense, period. And for that particular argument I defer to Jamie LaRue, Director of Colorado’s Douglas County Libraries, who recently partnered with the Colorado Independent Publishers Association to not only buy digital works outright and manage them in house, but to allow actual purchases of e-books via library catalogs. LaRue’s point on the stewardship of libraries needs to be the last word here, I think: “If you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust?” I hope both sides of the table are listening next week.
(Illustration is Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s A Bold Bluff, c. 1909. Because at the end of the day I’d still rather look at dogs playing poker than librarians or publishing CEOs.)
