Colorado Publishers and Libraries Collaborate on Ebook Lending Model
By Michael Kelley Mar 17, 2011A group of independent publishers has teamed up with an academic and a public library in Colorado to offer an ebook circulation model built on the idea that libraries are trustworthy owners and stewards of intellectual content.
The collaboration among the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA), Douglas County Libraries, and Red Rocks Community College Library will allow the libraries to buy, store, and manage access to ebooks on library servers; integrate the ebooks into their catalogs; and provide click-through purchases of the titles from the library catalog. Negotiations were still under way as to whether the ebook purchase price would be discounted.
"The genesis was the HarperCollins unilateral revision of library purchasing to be, first, buying nothing more than a license, and, second, a license limited by number of uses," Jamie LaRue, director of the Douglas County Libraries, told LJ. "Let's be clear about this. Publisher costs are falling. It just doesn't cost as much to post a file as it does to print and distribute copies of a hardback book. And yet the price to libraries---when we can buy these titles at all---is rising.... And, now, publishers want to restrict the number of uses. That's insane."
Trusting libraries to manage and own content
Under the new partnership, which is scheduled to be up and running by June, the libraries will purchase every copy they circulate and limit use to a maximum of three weeks and to one user at a time for each copy purchased (e.g., three purchases would permit three simultaneous users). CIPA is trusting the libraries to manage access to the file, not reproduce it capriciously, and guard against piracy.
"If you can't trust a librarian, who can you trust?" LaRue said.
"The library will own the file...it's no different than the purchase and ownership of traditional books," Karen Reddick, executive director of CIPA, told LJ. "They agree to provide the [digital rights management]...I suspect our members will be monitoring how well they accomplish this with extreme interest, especially at first."
Reddick said that in general her membership believes the risk of abuse "is smaller than the risk of being ignored." The association has about 250 members.
"We are helping libraries identify quality electronic books by small publishers and helping independent publishers find an audience with libraries," she said.
One-stop shopping at the OPAC
If patrons don't wish to wait for access, they will have the option to buy, which would be a major patron convenience since sales of ebooks continue to soar: the Association of American Publishers reported today that ebook net sales for January increased by 115.8 percent versus January 2010 (from $32.4 million to $69.9 million).
"There are two options for providing the click-through purchase," LaRue said. "One is to hand patrons over to the corresponding record at the CIPA website. They're set up to deal with the order there. Another is to configure [the library's] Adobe Content Server to put together the purchase request, then hand it over," he said. "That's one of the things we'll be testing."
"Library sales lead to other sales," Reddick said.
On the back end, the Adobe Content Server can access ebook content stored within itself, and on its front end, it can connect either to e-commerce servers to enable financial transactions or to a library's online catalog to enable lending, according to the company's website. The cost is about $10,000 upfront and $1500 a year thereafter, and the libraries can attach DRM so that the circulation period will expire at the end of whatever date they set.
LaRue said that sales could possibly be discounted for a registered library user, or the patron could choose to devote a portion of the sales price to the library.
"We want to demonstrate to the publishers that we add value to the ebook market," LaRue said.
Digital vendor OverDrive has offered a click-through purchase option on its platform for about a year, but it has not yet made available any statistics on purchases.
The libraries will have to create their own MARC records, but the goal, LaRue said, is to "have high-quality catalog records---in one catalog, not scattered across multiple websites, like our Balkanized databases."
LaRue also said that if the library's mission is to provide a representative sample of the culture, then "big publishing houses really aren't where the action is."
"What I'm trying to accomplish is what libraries always try to accomplish: to gather, organize, and offer to the public the most interesting stuff we can find," he said. "Just suppose that the best writing we have, the fastest growing sector of publishing, is not represented in libraries at all. Shouldn't it be? Let's find out."
According to the 2009 Statistical Report released in April 1010 by R.R. Bowker, the total number of titles produced was 1,052,803; 764,448 of that overall figure came from micropublishers, self-publishers, and reprints of public domain titles.
"Dealing with independent publishers is a step closer to a rich, untapped vein of writing," LaRue said. "I hope to have 100 original, independently published ebooks in our catalog by June. As a public sector entity I'm happy to partner with private entities when it's a good deal for both of us. But I think our constituents expect better of us than...just hand[ing] over public money to corporations on whatever terms they set. We're librarians. We're supposed to be smart."
