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HarperCollins has announced that its ebooks will only be able to be checked out by library patrons 26 times before a library would have to re-purchase the ebook title if they want to lend it again.  This has caused an outcry among librarians who have, in some cases, started boycotting Harper Collins ebooks.

I understand that in the publishers mind this is their way of trying to approximate for wear and tear on printed books which might require a library to repurchase copies which have been extremely well read but I thought 26 seemed to be a fairly low figure, even before watching this video by the Pioneer Library System of Oklahoma in which Swimming to Catalina by Stuart Woods was checked out 120 times and still going strong. 

You would think there would be a better way to do this.  Even if they just charged a dollar or two more for library version of the ebook which would offer unlimited lending, publishers would win on some longer tail titles and the libraries would continue to get their value for dollar on the popular titles.  Whatever the solution libraries and publishes are going to have to find a better one if we ever want to be able to borrow ebooks like we do their paper cousins.

[Now Reading: The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi ... in hardcover, which I checked out of my local library]

Just to beat the dead horse a little more

The discussion I brought up yesterday about copyrights of different book formats is really about the only thing going in book news right now so that is what you get to hear about.  This morning's Jacket Copy was quoting more music industry history lessons.  This time dredging up that that before cassettes were going to ruin the music business it was records... 

"That was a time when people thought records were really bad for musicians," said Gary Calamar, the co-author of "Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again," a new history of (and unashamedly geeky paean to) the culture of the record store. "People were just getting used to electricity, and many artists resented the presence of records. They thought nobody would buy sheet music anymore."

It's not that the music industry is the only comparison for the book industry; it's just that changes they faced are a little fresher in our minds.  Thinking about this makes me wish I could travel back to 1500, just to hear a first-hand account from monks screaming about how Johannes' device was the work of Satan, and that the printing press would be the ruin of the written word.

I'm sorry, I swear I'll be off my soap box any second now...

[Now Reading: Heat by Bill Buford

It's funny to think about but that is what we have to do currently if we want the same book in two different formats. It has always has been the case, and we never really questioned it because just say you bought a hardcover copy of The Grapes of Wrath, but years later wanted to re-read it while on vacation.  You might very well buy a copy of the paperback, so you don't get your nice hardback all soggy when you fall into the pool while reading it on an air mattress.  You had two copies, someone had to print them, ship them and stock them and you payed for both of them.

Now, what about digital books?  You bought the hardcover, should you pay if you want to have a digital copy as well?

This exact debate has been flaring up again and again in publishing and reading circles for the past several months (years?) but really got going when the New York Times journalist Randy Cohen wrote in his Ethicist column that downloading a pirated copy of a book you already purchased new is pretty much O.K.

Then  one of my admittedly favorite authors, John Scalzi chipped in his two cents on his Whatever blog and essentially agreed with Cohen. 

Scalzi does go on to, correctly, explain that there are limits to this and that an Audio book differs in that the reader and sound editors need their share, and obviously you can't download the Kite Runner movie because you bought the book, but in general both of these gentleman bring up the interesting point that a digital copy of a book you legally bought is essentially the same as making a cassette tape copy of that The Who - Live At Leeds record you wanted to preserve from the ware you knew you were going to inflict on it by playing it 3000 times.

So you know how I feel, tell me know your position while we wait for the lawyers to tell how this will end.

While I like authors and am occasionally skeptical of ebook readers, the Authors Guild's slam against the Amazon Kindle 2 confuses the heck out of me.

One of the features of the upgraded Kindle is that it can read a book out loud to you, using a canned computerized voice similar to the text to speech systems available on many current computers.

Upon hearing of this, the Authors Guild told the Wall Street Journal "They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Faced with pushback (including the suggestion that perhaps the Authors Guild would like to ban all reading aloud of books), the Guild retrenched, suggesting that publishers should consider forcing Amazon to add restrictions to books that could block access to the read-aloud feature.

This is absurd. Book owners can buy paperback books, and rebind them into hardcovers; companies like Brodart sell this service to libraries. It's as if the Authors Guild was trying to put Brodart out of business, claiming that rebinding paperbacks would infringe on their exclusive rights to sell hardcover rights.

There's been a lot written about this, but my favorite is Neil Gaiman's take.

"When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."