Neither A Borrower Nor A Lender Be

The library community has been struggling with the increasing demand for e-books among their patrons. Wildly inflated prices (often ten times what consumers pay), severe restrictions, and outright refusal to loan by many publishers has led libraries to slash budgets for other materials, and to abandon their collection standards in a desperate attempt to fill their virtual shelves with something, anything.

Meanwhile, consumers are more and more being frustrated by the clampdown on perfectly legitimate lending of e-books that they own. The shut down of LendInk, a site to facilitate legal sharing, is just the latest symptom of this trend.

Balancing these factors is the importance of copyright, and the perfectly reasonable desire of publishers and authors to control the distribution of books they have created.

Keeping this in mind, how has the digital revolution changed what it means to "own" a particular story?

---

 

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Comments

[Timothy (TRiG)]

My immediate reaction is, Richard Stallman was remarkably prescient.

TRiG.

[Catherine]

My sister-in-law discovered recently (after her father died) that you also can't bequeath e-books after your death. You can bequeath the reader, but the library is lost. I find that very distressing to contemplate.

[Froborr]

Copyright has ceased to mean "the right to make copies" and now means "the right to own copies." Publishers increasingly refuse to sell anything, just rent it out and call it selling.

There is absolutely nothing anyone can do about this short of legislative action, which will not happen.

[Devorah]

First, introduction. I am long time lurker who is trying to be more involved with the world and not just observing. I really like what a lot of you think so I am commenting (first time ever!!)

I read a lot, as much as a book a week or even a day. I used to live at the library because I could not afford or store the amount of books that i read on a monthly basis. A year ago, I received a Kindle for Christmas. I love IT! I like the convenience of carrying a huge book in my pocket or reading some weird fantasy book that nobody can comment on. But the one thing i miss, is the ability to pass on the book. Since i don't keep many books, I use to pass them on. It seems very sad and wasteful to me that only I am reading this book that i love. So much so that i went and bought a paper copy of a really cool series, so i could share with a friend. I am not sure how one reconciles the two sides.

Also, I have not been to the library in about 8 months. I am not sure how much money I have spent on the Kindle. It is so easy to finish one book and move on to the next.

[Silver Adept]

Most commonly, the digital revolution treats electronic materials as if they are to be governed by software licenses rather than books or other things governed by copyright and fair use, which allows the publishers to dictate the terms that will make them immensely profitable. Or to cut out libraries entirely, because they consider us not much more than thieves who cut into profits by wanting to share works.

But it started with software, which told us we didn't own things, just licenses to things. Now everything wants to go that way. We need to treat digital works more like we treat physical ones, under the same rules.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

It started with software, which told us we didn't own things, just licenses to things.

To a certain extent, with digital media it has to work that way. But those licenses should be a lot less punitive than they generally are. There are open licenses, such as the Creative Commons licenses (CC0, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) and not-quite-open licenses (CC-BY-ND, CC-BY-NC), and then there are the nasty licenses. I'm not aware of any commercial license which isn't (a) very long, and (b) quite nasty. But they might well exist. I don't know much about commercial licenses, and what I do know is about software, not books, though as Silver Adept says, the licenses are often quite similar.

I don't want a novel with a EULA.

TRiG.

[Amaryllis]

Hello, Devorah!

I'm a Christmas Kindle owner also; that 'get/give a Kindle for Christmas" campaign must have made millions. And it has the advantages you mention, but I find myself at the library a lot anyway. Early adopter isn't me, I guess.

I've never tried its e-book lending program, so I have no opinion on how well it's working. But in response to The library community has been struggling with the increasing demand for e-books among their patrons, here's yesterday's Unshelved.

It is annoying that you can't give away an e-book once you've bought it. Why can't there be a way to transfer the license, if you want to think of it like that?

[Ross]

@Amaryllis: Because there is no possible advantage to the publisher in letting you do that.

But hey, it's not like they *wouldn't* ban the sale of used books if it were remotely possible to do so.

[Froborr]

Because there is no possible advantage to the publisher in letting you do that.

Which is why the legislative action that won't happen is the only way to solve this problem.

But hey, it's not like they *wouldn't* ban the sale of used books if it were remotely possible to do so.

Sale, nothing. They'd ban borrowing books if they could do so. And with e-books, they can and have. It's sad, too--if we could actually get the proper laws and regulations in place to block the publishing companies from abusing them and enable libraries to lend them, e-books IMO are straight-up superior to dead tree books.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

If the eReader itself was built with Free Software, it would be a lot more difficult for publishers to enforce their licenses. Did you know that Amazon can actually delete books from your Kindle?

I really should try using an eReader one day, but the more I find out about licensing, the more I become fanatical about Free Software, so I don't want to actually own an eReader until a Free one is available.

TRiG.

[Mike Timonin]

They'd ban borrowing books if they could do so.

Note the Harper Collins boycott:

http://boycottharpercollins.com/

http://boycottharpercollins.com/explanation

[storiteller]

The library community has been struggling with the increasing demand for e-books among their patrons, here's yesterday's Unshelved.

I love Unshelved! Unfortunately, it had dropped off my radar since I lost all of my bookmarks. Thanks for reminding me of it.

Which is why the legislative action that won't happen is the only way to solve this problem.

Probably it's the only way for everyone to comply. Fortunately, a few publishers are voluntarily "opening the doors" to sharing and passing along ebooks. Baen Books has never used DRM (digital rights management), and recently Tor/Forge required that all vendors sell their books without DRM. John Scalzi has some good notes about it, as his book Redshirts was the first one they released that way.

What's particularly good about the Tor decision is that Tor is actually owned by Macmillan. So if this works out well for them, a much larger overall publisher might adopt that philosophy as well. If they did that and it worked out, I think it could lead to a major shift across the entire industry. Legislation would be ideal, but with the continual return of SOPA/PIPA, I don't see it happening any time soon. The second best thing to do is keep encouraging these policies.

In terms of the library, I would personally prefer for them to spend their money on programming that helps people who wouldn't have access to books otherwise, specially kids and teens, than on ebooks. Someone with his or her own ebook reader can probably afford to buy books on their own, unlike a lot of other patrons. On the other hand, if you don't keep the wealthier patrons happy, they turn down your budget for the next fiscal year. (The library's budget got turned down every year where I grew up, although not because of a lack of services on their part.) So it's a bit of a Catch-22.

[Panda Rosa]

It's stuff like this that make me stubbornly cling to my old-fashioned paper-and-ink books. I know I am increasingly a dinosaur, but hearing about all the fuss about not being able to borrow an e-book, or passing them on, or the money spent on something you don't like and can't return, maybe I'm not the only fool. And if something happens to your Kindle, like it getting lost or swiped or dropped in the tub or frozen up with a virus, then often your whole library is lost.
The Kindle is a fine tool, esp for students or travelers, but that's just it, it's a TOOL. I don't understand why so many people think their Kindle is meant to replace their old-fashioned paper-book library no matter how many bells and whistles are attached to it. I still have books from my parents' and even grandparents' homes on my shelves; looking at Catherine's comments, about how her sister-in-law was unable to access her own (the SIL's) father's books makes you wonder how many more new snarls we will face. But somehow "ooo, it's so shiny!" tends to rule the day.

[cjmr]

As long as you've bought the Kindle content from Amazon, if your Kindle gets lost or destroyed you are supposed to be able to retrieve it from 'The Cloud'. If you hack other e-format books to read on your Kindle, not so much.

[Ross]

@cmjr: But in such a case, you've already passed that ebook in its original format through some at least marginally less losable device, no?

I'd be a lot more fond of ebooks if they did something where if you bought the hardcover, they threw in the ebook version (They could even make a modest increase in the price of the hardcover to pay for this). ereaders aren't cheap enough for me to justify buying one just to replace paperbacks and books I wouldn't want a physical copy of, I enjoy the physicality of books too much to give up having hardcover copies of books I want to Have as Things and it's too expensive to do both.

[anamardoll]

But hey, it's not like they *wouldn't* ban the sale of used books if it were remotely possible to do so.

We're seeing this with video games, too, which is seeing a lot of the same issues. Publishers are trying to lock down games so that the first sale is the only possible sale and so that used games aren't a possibility anymore. It absolutely infuriates me.

It also strikes me as very damaging to their base. Most of the people I know who buy new do so BECAUSE they can recoup the loss later on a sale. (Not much of a recoup, but in their mind it's worth it.) Most of the people I know who buy used are perfectly content to NEVER BUY ANYTHING EVER AGAIN, if used stops being an option. So cutting out the used market, from my perspective on the ground, doesn't increase sales (used gamers just stop buying) and effectively lowers sale (new gamers will buy less because less money to spend).

I think this is highly relevant to books: I know a number of people who choose not to get into eBooks because of the borrowing/selling/bequeathing issues.

[Gotchaye]

My experience with games is a bit different. I find Steam (for PC games) or Amazon sales to be hugely more convenient than hunting for used games. Publishers aren't just trying to eliminate the used game market; they're also cutting prices much more quickly and aggressively for new copies in order to price discriminate in the most profitable way. It's not that they object to used games in principle, but they obviously want the surplus that's currently captured by Gamestop and the like, and they also want to get the most that individuals are willing to pay*. Console games may be in a transitional period where publishers are cracking down on used games without putting in place other systems that allow people to whom games are worth less to pay less for them (although I've seen more aggressive price cuts for them too in the last few years).

Personally, I'm pretty happy to give up on "ownership" for digital media, and I'm not sure the concept even makes much sense. You need a lot of arbitrary restrictions to get a system that's both workable and which allows reasonable lending, such that even something which tries to mimic the way that physical media work is going to look like a license. We definitely need regulation and standardization of the licensing terms, though. And of course I have back-ups of all of my Kindle titles, and I wouldn't feel bad about cracking the encryption and continuing to use the books if Amazon went out of business or they tried to take them off my account or something. That's the sort of thing that I think reasonable license regulation should address.

However, I do think that something like LendInk was problematic and probably /should/ be excluded by a reasonable license. It seemed like the first step towards what has to be the publishers' worst nightmare - a lending mega-site which looks like Amazon.com but which uses something like a bit-torrent client's share ratios instead of currency. Organized lending is problematic in a way that lending to friends and family isn't. I have no idea how library lending should work for e-books; I guess it's either got to be made intentionally inconvenient for borrowers or else profitable for the publishers.

*A problem publishers have with the used game market is just that it /isn't/ universal. Cars are priced assuming that they're going to be constantly in use for many years, but only some of the people who buy new games sell them used or play them forever (most play them for a bit and then do nothing with the game), and only those people could profitably be made to pay a premium for the ability to sell used.

[Silver Adept]

@Gotchaye - It is not an either/or on inconvenience for users and profitability for publishers. Of those that sell to organizations that lend to libraries, we can expect to pay three to ten times the list price for a hardcover book, and are still governed by "one copy" rules that say we have to pay that price for each additional copy we want to simultaneously lend. (No, there are no "site licenses" that would allow for us to lend to everyone all at once. That would be convenient.) Some companies will then charge us that price again after the ebook has circulated a laughably low number of times (compared to even mass market paperbacks). Others will add additional hurdles to cross if you're using a device from a company they don't like. And that's also with the restrictive DRM that its basically administered only by one, maybe two, companies and forces you to make an account with them. As well as the formats that the device supports and the ones that it takes rooting or other such warranty-voiding techniques to obtain access to.

Streaming everything works when you are always connected with an always-on connection that you party a flat monthly fee for. (And then you pay an additional fee on to of that for your membership in the steaming/cloud item. And then maybe more money when you purchase stuff from that service.) If you don't have that, don't want it, can't afford it, or lack the infrastructure, then streaming sucks. For a lot of people that come into the library, streaming sucks.

Librarians would lie to know why electronic materials are cheaper for consumers to purchase individually, but far more expensive for libraries to purchase. We've done wonderfully so far with the laws that given purchasing print materials - please extend us the same courtesy with digital ones.

[Marc Mielke]

If you hack other e-format books for your Kindle, chances are they are already backed up on the computer you used to convert. The most common free app to do that automatically creates a library on the main PC.

http://calibre-ebook.com/

[Ross]

@Silver Adept: Because when your business model is based on "Treat the end consumers like criminals", there is an implication that any middle-man between the person making the product and the criminal consuming it is, essentially, a pimp or a street dealer.

(But seriously, the reason is that they want to drive you out of business because they hate you and everything you stand for)

[Silver Adept]

@Ross - well, yes, we know that. Its can be amusing or frustrating watching publishers wiggle around that and try not to make it sound that way, but yes, without the legal protections public libraries have, we would have long been sued into oblivion as thieves, pirates, and infringers. We wonder why we can't extend those already-existing protections to the digital realm for the same price as print.

Of course, we're legally forbidden from buying politicians with tax dollars, so maybe that has something to do with it, too.

[Gotchaye]

@Silver Adept: I didn't mean to imply that the way digital library lending is handled now is fine, and I appreciate your explanations of how things work now and agree that there are big problems there.

But I'm not sure what "extending libraries/borrowers the same courtesy with digital books" looks like. Most of the restrictions on physical lending are natural, in a sense. Only one copy can be lent out at a time per copy the library owns, people have to physically go to the library to borrow and return books, and books degrade over time and with use. Obviously we could in principle set up a system for digital lending which closely mimics these restrictions (and others), and one copy per license is already a thing, but the last two just seem weird. Should people have to physically go to the library to put a book on to their devices? Should readers be given an intentionally inferior experience with borrowed e-books, like simulated coffee stains? That last seems especially absurd, but these sorts of inconveniences seem to me likely to be a big part of why many people choose to buy books instead of borrowing the ones that are available to be borrowed (I'm open to correction on this point). The other major reason is that people just like to own physical books, but the jumping off point for this thread is that it's not really clear what it even means to "own" digital media.

Basically, I'm just having a hard time imagining how digital lending should actually work so as to produce something like what we have now for physical media without having a much bigger effect than physical libraries on new book sales. That's why I said it seemed to me that the experience either has to be made intentionally inconvenient for borrowers (not librarians) or more profitable for publishers (paying more per copy or per check-out than with physical lending). I'd love to hear more detailed explanations of how library lending should work - what legislation should there be, and what aspects of physical lending are we trying to mimic and what are we trying to improve on? - from people who've thought about this a lot more than I have.

[Silver Adept]

@Gotchaye - I'm sorry, I misread you, then. My apologies if I seemed harsh or attacking you off-point.

The things you mention about physical lending are things that shouldn't matter if we want to take advantage of the brilliance of digital content. We don't have to be limited by physical copies that degrade over time (assuming that we always have space, power, and compatible converters to move out content to the next format/platform - not always a guarantee, as other comments have shown, and as our history points out whenever a streaming, DRM, or game server shuts down) nor do we have to engage with the one copy per person problem.

The best aspects of digital lending look a lot like widespread piracy. A single copy, always available, to an unlimited number of users and devices, potentially for an unlimited period of time, which would allow for proliferation on a grand scale, and "free" to the end user. And it should Just Work. What we have now has artificial roadblocks and restrictions that deliver an inferior experience to the borrower than buying affords them, and libraries and lending institutions being charged through the nose for the privilege of that inferior experience.

Owning a copy of an electronic work should grant the buyer all the rights under First Sale doctrine (here in the United States, substitute your appropriate ownership exemption legislation/court cases here) at the very least, and that should apply to lending institutions as well. We can then set or own policies, as owners, about how we lend or sell or restrict access to our property, rather than being held captive by a licensing agreement that takes away those rights.

Perhaps analogous (or not): We want Doom/Quake/The Incredible Machine, which have very robust modding tools that allow someone to construct new adventures using either our own assets or the assets in the game, and then to distribute them, rather than, say, being served with a cease and desist for trying to recreate the SNES classic Chrono Trigger for a 3D environment. (Admittedly, the N64, but still...) or being forced to communicate with Blizzard servers constantly to play the single-player, non-online mode of Diablo III. (I'm guessing it also scans to see if you're using any sort of unapproved modification and disables it or refuses to run if it detects anything.)

Tl:Dr - best ownership would mean granting the rights already given to physical copies, which would also allow for a best lending practice to develop unhindered by publishers and other interests that want to stop you from having any right to do anything at all with what you bought.

[Mira]

I'm with TRiG on this one - it seems like a market where the publishers' interests are being served at the expense of consumers, and I'm not willing to buy an e-reader until they seem less unduly restrictive. It's a little surprising to me to hear that ebooks are so popular in libraries, since I see "staring at a screen for more hours" as a major disadvantage, but on the other hand, I stare at screens most of the day.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

I think some (many?) eReaders are designed to be a lot easier on the eyes than computer screens. The kindle is not backlit, and uses eInk technology rather than standard monitor technology.

TRiG.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

(This, incidentilly, leads to questions on Jewish websites about whether turning a page on which the tetragrammaton appears counts as "erasing the name of God".)

[Mike Timonin]

hapax - I know you won't post your thoughts on this topic here - any chance of a post re: libraries and e-books over at your site?

[Dragoness Eclectic]

@Ross: I'd be a lot more fond of ebooks if they did something where if you bought the hardcover, they threw in the ebook version (They could even make a modest increase in the price of the hardcover to pay for this).

Baen Books does this. In fact, with some popular series, like David Weber's "Honor Harrington" novels, when you buy the latest hardback you get a CD with the ENTIRE series up to that point in E-Book formats. This is really awesome for catching up on a series you can't find the start of or early issues of.

As for me, personally--when publishers started stomping all over the Constitutional intent of copyright (LIMITED monopoly for the purpose of PROMOTING the arts & sciences), I started taking the law into my own hands, and I recommend everyone else do so, too. I strip the DRM from all eBooks I buy, convert them into an open/standard format (ePub) and back the copies up periodically--if you maintain backups, and convert formats when the technology changes, eBooks last longer than paper. I do not post my eBooks for the entire universe to download, because I do not have the right to distribute copies. I do have the moral right to make back-ups for my own use and to fold, spindle and mutilate (i.e., decrypt) any files I own.

I don't feel guilty about torrenting books where the author is dead, and they are permanently out-of-print or that were first copyrighted more than 20 years ago. Sorry, just because Hollywood bought and paid for extensions to copyright law far beyond the original limits or intent doesn't mean I'm morally obliged to support corrupt laws, or provide a permanent living for the author's descendents. Nor am I morally obliged to participate in the loss of arts and knowledge by cooperating in making works inaccessible via DRM.