Ken
Roberts & Michael Ciccone of Hamilton Public Library presented
this intriguing presentation called Tales from the North
describing efforts in Canada to resolve the current crisis/stalemate
that exists between publishers and libraries over the issues
surrounding ebooks.
To
start Roberts and Ciccone described the publishing situation in
Canada and the differences between the situation in Canada and the
U.S. As Canada only has about 25 million people who prefer to read
in English (not counting the ~7 million French speakers there, and
compared to the 300+ million in the U.S.) and has a variety of
government protections for publishers, the starting position was a
little different for the Canadians.
There
are two major publishing trade organizations in Canada: The Canadian
Publishers' Council and the Association of Canadian Publishers. The
Canadian Publishers' Council consists of the larger, more recognized
publishers like HarperCollins and Random House. The Association of
Canadian Publishers is made up of 135 small publishers. Under
Canadian law it was required that print titles be acquired for
libraries directly from publishers as a way to support the Canadian
publishing industry. With the introduction of electronic versions of
books, however, the old law no longer applied and publishers were
starting to be bypassed by services like Overdrive.
So the
libraries and the publishers went to the negotiating table and in
January worked out the elements of a deal that make both sides happy.
Libraries will license, not own, titles from the publishers at a
cost of the average of the last three years of sales of midlist and backlist titles
for the area the library serves, and will get broad access to these
titles. It seems that they will be available in ePub only, as the
Kindle presence is not great in Canada and is not worth making things
more complicated. It's an interesting and promising resolution to
some of the problems. The exact same solution will probably not
develop in the U.S., but it does perhaps point a way that can make
both sides happy.
As
Hamilton Public Library uses Bibliocommons, a Canadian company, for
its catalog discovery tool, they even worked out a brief test of
integrating the ebook reservation and checkout directly into the
catalog (one of the things libraries really wanted when they went to
the negotiating table) which was cool to see in the screenshots they
showed.
Following
Hamilton's presentation, Matt Barnes from Ebrary discussed the
history of Ebrary's ebook projects (so far largely with academics)
and the problems they've worked out between publishers and libraries
in a presentation titled E-Books Aren't Print Books.
Ebrary has been
primarily academic, but is starting to shift to public. When Ebrary
started working with publishers, they began by selling subscriptions
to 2-5 year old titles that the publishers figure they won't sell
many more of but libraries still want and would find relevant.
From this point
Ebrary started to move to a perpetual archive (ownership) model for
some titles.
The next step was a
patron driven access model which would provide previews of titles and
if a patron uses enough of the book the library pays for the use.
This took more negotiation to work out and make the publishers happy.
A pilot program proved that this could work and be a profitable
venture.
Finally they
discussed short term loans (rentals). This was something that could
displace or supplement ILL.
These four models
have worked well for Ebrary and its ebook services for libraries so
far and have kept publishers happy. However, Ebrary keeps ebook
access restricted to websites.
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