Thought for Food Blog

Libraries, Ebooks, and Publishers – An Unhappy Union?

Ask anyone in the know and they will tell you that e-books are becoming an increasingly important part of publishers’ business. As such, libraries, booksellers and e-book orientated start-ups have built e-book lending programs aimed at providing remote customers who own e-readers a modern version of what they once could get only by visiting their local library.

While book industry players including AmazonPenguin Random HouseOverDrive and others grapple with rapidly changing e-reader and bookselling technologies, libraries are continuing to do what they have done for generations: provide their members with free access to information using the best technologies available to them.

Ebooks | IFIS Publishing

In the digital book age, that means buying e-books from publishers and lending them out to users, just like print books. As for the start-ups like LendInk and Gluejar, they aim to profit from e-lending by facilitating e-book-sharing.

As they always have, publishers sell large amounts of print- and e-books to libraries and continue to use the public institutions as marketing platforms for new books as book retail shelf space becomes scarcer and high street footfall declines.

According to the American Library Association (ALA), a Chicago-based library trade association, there are over 120,000 libraries in the US, including public, academic, school, armed forces, government and special libraries. Of these libraries, practically all academic, public and school facilities are connected to the Web for public access and staff use.

By and large, libraries protect reader anonymity; therefore data identifying readers and quantifying their use of e-books are hard to come by. However, according to a quarterly publication, Patron Profiles, produced in partnership with Library Journal, two-thirds of US libraries report that they make e-books available to their users. A 2011 survey among 1,029 librarians by online digital library ebrary suggests that librarians in general want to provide more, easier access to e-books.

Earlier this year, senior leadership from the ALA met with representatives from some of the largest US publishers, including Penguin, MacmillanSimon & Schuster and the Perseus Books Group. At the time of the meeting, two of the five – Random House and Perseus – were allowing libraries to purchase and lend out any of their e-books. Penguin offered only their backlist to libraries, and Macmillan and Simon & Schuster did not sell any e-books to libraries.

Ultimately, for many publishers, security of e-book content is a major concern and a prohibitive factor in large scale e-book distribution to libraries. In fact, if media reports are to be believed, Penguin’s decision to stop selling OverDrive new titles may have been about security issues.

While distributors continue to experiment with models for e-book distribution through libraries, libraries themselves are also experimenting, finding new ways to make information accessible while also trying to figure out how to incentivise publishers to entrust them with their e-books.

The issues involved with e-book library lending will eventually be resolved. Additionally, as an increasing number of stakeholders become involved in the market, the rigidly-defined, traditional roles of publisher, distributor, bookseller, and library will become evermore blurred.

One thing, at least, seems quite clear: As publishers struggle to sell and market their products in a world of declining retail space, libraries will become more valuable. If digital shelf space at libraries proves to be a successful marketing venture – as it is for hardcopy books – then to supply libraries and their members with e-books will cultivate and nurture customers of the future.

(Image Credit: stokpic via www.pexels.com)



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