captainsblog | Intercourse the Penguin! (Reply)

The continuing sto-r-r-r-r-eeee of Big Publishing's war on libraries just took another turn. A bad one:

Three months of library drama are coming to a climax this evening as big-six publisher Penguin announced that it is ending its relationship with digital library distributor OverDrive. Starting tomorrow, it will stop offering e-books and digital audiobooks to libraries—at least until it finds a new partner.

With this move, Random House becomes the only big-six publisher to allow unrestricted access to its e-books in libraries—though it will raise prices beginning in March.

Not that these publishers were all that generous with their offerings in the first place. As I commented after our bed-ridden neighbor got a Nook for Christmas, our 37-branch library system has virtually no virtual books to choose from at any given moment. The ones they do have are hard to search for, a pain to download onto the e-reader and can't be renewed.

Yet, according to the Big Six, they're apparently too convenient for us peons:

The ALA reported on those meetings earlier this week, highlighting a concern that may have led to Penguin’s move this evening:

A key issue that arose in each meeting is the degree to which “friction” may decline in the ebook lending transaction as compared to lending print books. From the publisher viewpoint, this friction provides some measure of security. Borrowing a print book from a library involves a nontrivial amount of personal work that often involves two trips—one to pick up the book and one to return it. The online availability of e-books alters this friction calculation, and publishers are concerned that the ready download-ability of library ebooks could have an adverse effect on sales.

Silly me. It's not fiction in those buildings; it's friction. Let me tell you; after a month and a half, now, of scanning booklists, headbanging in frustration as the titles are either nonexistent or unavailable, and then jumping through digital hoops to download, transfer and- dare I hope it?- READ the titles, it's a honeybunch easier to drive a mile or two in any direction to one of our library branches, look up (or at) the book I want, and check it out.

Plus, this misses the point of what libraries do. For every lost sale, there's a created opportunity to build a lifelong relationship between the borrower and the writer of that book. You would think Big Six publishers would have caught on to this after an underemployed UK author broke every rule and made them a Gringotts' vault full of money in the past decade. Once we like something by someone, we pass "go" and head directly for "love." We buy their books. We go to their signings. We do crazy-ass things to get friends to go to their signings for us. We Kickstart publishing efforts (why, look! Here's one now!) . We review and blog about things like crazy, giving those houses way more pub than their 19th-century distribution/review systems will ever get them. Library books are our gateway drug, to so many different forms of legal high- and Penguin, and I'm sure all the others, are just counting their beans and saying, "We don't care."

Careful what you wish for, though, because before long, neither will we, and your ivory towers of editors and accountants will come toppling down into the moat of irrelevancy where the likes of Media Play and Borders now sit, barely remembered.