Ebooks and Libraries. A Match Made in Heaven…or Hell?

For those who don't know, there's been a lot of talk lately about ebook sales to libraries. It isn't that libraries don't want to offer ebooks to their patrons. They do. The problem is the effect those sales will have on publishers' bottom lines.

As  JULIE BOSMAN of the New York Times put it in her article,

As Library E-Books Live Long, Publisher Sets Expiration Date

Imagine the perfect library book. Its pages don't tear. Its spine is unbreakable. It can be checked out from home. And it can never get lost.

That's a libraries' perfect book. Never torn. Never lost. Never needs to be replaced.

That's also publisher's worst nightmare.

Publishers need to sell books. Lots of books. And in this wildly changing market, that's becoming increasingly difficult.

There's no doubt the market is shifting. More and more people are buying ebooks. That number of ebook readers/buyers is increasingly impacting publishers' bottom lines. Their business models are based upon the sales of paperbacks and hard covers. Their business models are crumbling.

So what must they do? Adapt? Find a way to make the new market work for them. That's exactly what HarperCollins is doing, by limiting the number of times any one ebook can be checked out. I'm an author, and a library patron. I can appreciate what they're trying to do. However, is 26 checkouts really a reasonable limit? According to Bosman's article, that would allow (assuming a 2 week checkout period) one full year of distribution.

Do libraries restock all their inventory every year? I don't think there's a library that exists that could afford to do that. Are the ebooks selling at a lower price than the paperback or hard cover version? I can't tell you that.

Clearly, HarperCollins doesn't want libraries to carry their ebooks. Right? Maybe not.

"We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book ecosystem, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors," the company said in a statement.

The may have a point. But 26? Really?

As both an author and patron, I hope other publishers don't follow in their footsteps–setting such a low limit on ebook checkouts. But if they do, I'm sure someone–indie authors, perhaps–will be happy to jump in, find a way to make the situation mutually beneficial and gleefully cart those royalty checks to the bank.

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