And here we are because of Disney and Netflix. Library copies of ebooks are really, and I don’t say this lightly, evil.
If only! Try ten times the price. Triple the price I could possibly go for as you can lend them a bit more widely.
26 loans sounds fair but I have plenty of paperback textbooks that we covered in plastic that have been loaned out much much more than that. Hardbacks don’t last so long with general use as people put them down the wrong way or the hinges break otherwise.
And to be clear it isn’t the DRM in and of itself that’s the issue – IA uses it too. It’s the publishers wanting the right to use the DRM to yank the e-book as if it’s a movie or series on Netflix or other streaming subscription service rather than something the lender paid for. That’s why this ruling is dangerous for libraries in general.
As you said earlier, this is really a battle in corporate America’s larger campaign against first-sale doctrine, with the goal being that consumers will no longer truly own the things they buy, be it a book or movie or a printer or a toaster or a car.
[Have a Coke @robertmckenna]
And that’s just greed, wait until malice joins the parade.
Imagine where the government (or some oligarchs), through the publishers, has control over the right to read, and you have to submit bio-metric data just to open it, and maybe forbidden if you’re one of those people. (Start with locking kids out of adult books, to keep them safe, right?)
People will have to go the the black market to obtain the wild books, free of control.
As in a Project 2025 regime. It’m sure a UK-style, oligarch-friendly re-work of libel law is on their agenda, and instantly disappearing e-books critical of Il Douche will follow in short order.
recently, cairn sold me an ebook which consisted solely of page images (at a reasonable price, though). I had to run it through an OCR to get a usable ebook-- and I took the opportunity to find and globally remove the watermark-- really distracting on a kindle.
In a Project 2025 regime, books on racism (and countless other categories) would no longer be required, so flip that switch!
well thank goodness no one on the supreme court is being paid by any of these publishers /s 
if everyone recuses themselves, i call dibs on presiding…
The digital edition needs to have a different ISBN to the print edition. ISBNs make it possible to track lendings, and very importantly, to calculate royalty payments to authors and for any licensed material in the book, such as excerpts from other books, or photos. An unauthorised release by Internet Archive might put the publisher in contractual jeopardy. A defence to that would be to show you as the responsible publisher are making reasonable efforts to suppress unauthorised editions.
Hence the legal action against Internet Archive.
I’m a little relieved I can still find the following books:
The Devouring Fungus - Karla Jennings
Are You Morbid? - Thomas Gabriel Fischer
The Humane Interface - Jef Raskin
Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions - Al Jaffee
Who imagines the publishing industry was going to be very helpful navigating the minefield of copyright issues?
Actually, we go to enormous pains to help navigate copyright issues. Honest creators, publishers and sellers do not want to cheat people, or to be cheated.
Agree with everything you say here. In no way is what the IA doing piracy.
But! Libraries, like bookstores, often get wholesale pricing, usually 20 -40% off the retail price, for the print books they purchase. They (and we) don’t need to pay more to buy lendable copies. If a library wants to buy 99 cent used copies and lend those out, no problem.
@twsf Are you unfamiliar with public libraries in the United States? Buy it once and lend it out to anyone who wants it is literally the whole model, whether it’s a book. a cake pan, a power tool or a painting. Making a copy, and lending out the copy, is both legal and best practice for items that you want to preserve (such as, say, in an archive). The big restriction is that you can’t lend out more copies than you own. And IA built that in, just as libraries have been doing for decades.
Publishers much prefer the very very very recent model of licensing books rather than selling them, and licensing them to libraries at much higher rates than an individual would ever pay for a book, and adding all sorts of other terrible terms to them, but as long as they continue to sell them, anyone who buys one, you, me, libraries, whoever, can give it away, lend it for free, rent it out for profit, sell it to someone else.
Since they are still selling books, I think those evil libraries buying and lending the books are feeding the writers more than starving them.
The IA isn’t lending the digital edition. They are lending a digital copy of the archival copy of the print edition, which has been considered fair use (in the US) when physical archives have done it for years.
There is no tracking of lending of owned* editions beyond the library’s own purposes, and no royalty payments other than from the original sale from the publisher. (Again, in the US.)
*I was going to say “print editions” but there are companies that rent print books to libraries, and they might want to know how often their items are loaned out.
In the UK, authors get royalties from library lending.
Yup.
That’s why I specified that I was talking about the US. Which is where the IA is, and where the lawsuit happened, right?
It may be a derailment of the subject, but I think it is somehow related to the business model of books and publishers.
The used book market is dominated by “major international actors that do not pay taxes in France,” Vincent Montagne on France Culture radio last week, making reference to online retail platforms like Amazon, Rakuten or eBay.
The tax would only apply to them, he said, and not independent used book sellers, like the bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris, or charity shops
that sounds less problematic than the headline. i can understand a country being annoyed at corporations for not paying their fair share
I don’t know what’s wrong with people. So many of the same ones who pretend that AI violates copyrights (it doesn’t) and want it shut down because of it are fine with a group that mass pirated book and pretended they were acting as a library even though real libraries didn’t operate the same way that real libraries do. These same people are typically fine with pirating movies and songs and video games if they self-justify it by claiming it was abandonware (a made up term with no legal standing) or that they never would have paid for so the company isn’t losing any money when they steal it. Or they use an ad-blocker to get something for free that everyone has to see ads to get. Or they share streaming logins. None of these people are even pretending to follow a consistent moral code. They just feel massively entitled to personally get everything for free and screw businesses and then rationalize that position with whatever legal-sounding terms they can mouth but don’t understand.
Like the ones who don’t bother to read a thread that pre-bunks or points out the irrelevancy of many of their hot takes?
Or perhaps it’s the ones who get all worked up about piracy hurting companies and businesses with not a word about creators and artists (who regularly get screwed over by those poor, put-upon companies and businesses).
