(This is part of a series; the earlier posts are here.)
So, as I discussed earlier, e-textbooks have to compete with substantially discounted used textbooks. But scholarly books that are aimed largely at law professors and law students also have to compete with something even cheaper: library borrowing.
Law professors can generally get all the books they want for free, with minimal hassle and modest delay, just by asking their librarians. Law students can often do much the same, though with a bit more work. As a result, for instance, I never buy law-related e-books for my Kindle, though I do download free public domain items (such as Blackstone’s Commentaries), as well as draft articles and the like. Instead, I just borrow the paper books from the library.
Now of course borrowing these books isn’t really free for my employer. The library has to spend money on buying the books, as well as on maintenance, shelving and reshelving, and processing faculty delivery requests. Space that’s used for book stacks is also space that can’t be used for faculty and staff offices, classrooms, and the like. So libraries, their users, and publishers can all profit from making it possible to lend e-books on much the same terms as libraries can now lend books.
And fortunately, there’s ample precedent for this in the site licenses that many libraries already get for various online collections: HeinOnline’s collections of law journal articles, public domain legal classics, government documents, and some more recent treatises; Chadwyck’s Early English Books Online, Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Making of Modern Law, and other databases; the Oxford English Dictionary; and the like. University libraries routinely have such subscriptions for all their users, but some public libraries do as well. Libraries and publishers would likewise be able to negotiate for library licenses to lend all new e-books coming from the publisher.
Libraries pay flat rates for each database, and the rates are often quite substantial. This will likely be the same as to, say, a license to lend all new Harvard University Press books. But the costs of buying books can be high, too, especially when coupled with the other costs I mentioned above. Eliminating those other costs means that there will generally be some price point at which authorizing the library-wide license will both increase profits for publishers and decrease costs for libraries.
Determining that price point might not be easy. Different libraries have different costs. Publishers may be reluctant to negotiate in detail with each library. And there’s always difficulty with any change to the way people have long done business. But on balance, and especially given the precedent of the other online databases, libraries and publishers should be able to create an e-book lending model that would replace the old First-Sale-Doctrine-driven paper book lending model.
pete says:
Many public libraries already lend ebooks. We buy ebooks for the public library I work for (I am the buyer for non-fiction titles) and although I have not been a buyer for an academic library, there is nothing stopping them except the relatively minor hassle of setting up a system for checking the books out. Netlibary.com or a similar service can be used for that.
Generally public libraries, and from what I understand academic libraries as well, tend to buy by the title and pick how many copies can be leant out at a time for ebooks. And most libraries use third party vendors (largely for cataloging, billing, and other practical reasons) instead of negotiating directly with publishers. With so many different publishers it is a lot easier for librarians to go to a handful of vendor websites that they have long term contracts with then to set up individual deals with. 95%+ of the time I only use two different company’s websites to buy items, both of which are able to upload most fo the items cataloging information straight into our database. When I get something from anyone else, someone working for the library has to create the database record from scratch which costs extra time and money.
And do state run university libraries have to set up purchasing contracts through competetive bidding?
October 6, 2009, 1:35 pmPatHMV says:
Are you presuming that some sort of Digital Rights Management will inevitably be used for e-books? So far, the on-line music industry has not been able to come up with a universal, cross-platform DRM system. In fact, two of the biggest on-line music sellers, iTunes and Amazon, have given up the ghost on copy protection, and now sell all of their music without any DRM enabled.
Leaving aside the philosophical arguments over DRM (I don’t see how a lending model works in the absence of some sort of DRM), this presents a significant technical difficulty. Assuming that there’s not some sort of universal DRM system (a safe assumption, I think), will each publisher dictate what DRM is used, or will each library? Assuming some publishers use one brand of DRM and some use another, will students have to buy 2 or 3 different readers (or software-based readers for their computer) in order to access all of their library’s materials? Or will each library be able to pick a DRM model, and all of the students at that school will have to purchase appropriate software or hardware based on the library’s choice?
October 6, 2009, 1:39 pmpete says:
For current library ebooks there are usually a few different readers depending on the publisher. I know netlibrary downloads require multiple readers depending on publisher. All of the ones that I have seen are free to download and some ebooks are PDFs, but you have to use the current version of Adobe and can’t use a different program like Foxit.
For some library ebooks there is a time stamp on them that makes the file no longer work after it has been “checked out” for a designated period of time, but you can download the book or audiobook to your computer. After that time exires someone else can check it out. Other items can not be saved, but have to be viewed online and often only one library user at a time can look at it.
October 6, 2009, 1:50 pmPlastic says:
There are already some of these starting up, such as netlibrary and Gale Reference. I think that the key will be for e-book readers to drop to ~$50, then people will slowly shift away from paper and pricing will work itself out through normal market pressure.
October 6, 2009, 1:52 pmVolokh’s great series on ebooks, legal texts, & the future. | Jason Wilson | Electronic Books says:
[...] 5. What Manufacturers and Publishers Need To Do To Facilitate The Move To Electronic Delivery of Legal … [...]
October 28, 2009, 9:44 pmVolokh on eBooks & eReaders | Jason Wilson | Publishing says:
[...] his fifth post, Prof. Volokh focuses our attention on the problem of lending electronic books. More specifically, [...]
January 5, 2010, 2:22 am