Hamilton Public Library director Susan Sternberg said that local libraries, like thousands of others across the nation, are having trouble as they butt heads with publishers over the pricing and availability of e-books [...].
A hard copy of a book can be lent to a countless number of library patrons, but publishers will only license the use of e-books. This license is generally short-term, limiting how many times the library can lend a particular e-book and for how long it will be available in the library’s collection [...].
In three years, e-book distribution has grown from a few hundred a month to around 2,000 a month at the Hamilton Public Library, said Sternberg, though she still says that the high prices and limited use of these books is keeping hard copies the No. 1 commodity.
“Until that model changes, e-books will not surpass books in a library,” she said. If more e-books were available in the library, they would be used more frequently, Sternberg said.
On the state level, e-book purchases have skyrocketed, but still have yet to surpass hard copies. In 2009, New Jersey public libraries purchased nearly 2 million print books and only licensed 51,377 e-books, whereas in 2013, the library purchased 1.6 million print books and licensed about 879,000 e-books, said Bob Keith, the data coordinator for the state library [...].
Libraries are not the only entities offering electronic books. As sites such as Netflix, which provides thousands of movies for a flat monthly fee, increase in popularity, one major company is hopping on the trend, this time, offering books.
For $9.99 a month, Amazon offers unlimited book downloads granting access to over 600,000 titles ready to be downloaded on a free Kindle app, which can be used on computers, smartphones, tablets, and of course, Amazon Kindle readers. Though the consumer pays for this service, which was launched last month, it still provides competition to local libraries.US public libraries are serious competitors for Amazon's and other subscription services. As reported in a recent WSJ article, many of these libraries have rich and up-to-date e-book collections that surpass Amazon Kindle Unlimited catalogue:
Of the Journal's 20 most recent best-selling e-books in fiction and nonfiction, Amazon's Kindle Unlimited has none—no "Fifty Shades of Grey," no "The Fault in Our Stars." Scribd and Oyster each have a paltry three. But the San Francisco library has 15, and my South Carolina library has 11.While Amazon asks you to pay $9.99 a month, public libraries are free.
The problem is that the model used by libraries for physical books cannot be easily extended to e-books. The number of physical copies held by the library limits how many times titles can be lent. No such natural limit exists for e-books. Publishers need to create the limit artificially, otherwise all the e-book distribution would move to public libraries. The road chosen by publishers is to put a cap on the number of licenses sold to libraries, which immediately leads to the question of which number is optimal (for the publishers or socially).
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