The e-library controversy

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on March 2nd, 2011 at 08:10 AM | | Tweet

With all due respect, all the flowers and butterflies, unicorns, rainbows and fairy dust won't convince me that HarperCollins loves libraries and library patrons right now.

HarperCollins sales exec, Josh Marwell, recently wrote an open letter on the company’s library relations blog, Library Love Fest, explaining the publisher’s controversial new e-book lending policy for libraries.

Stating, “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 eco-system, 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.”

Marwell goes on to explain that e-books can only be checked out 26 times by library patrons until they expire, and an ensuing TweetWar erupted, as well as a spike in the e-book blogosphere generally. Here’s a smattering of random comments:

“With all due respect, all the flowers and butterflies, unicorns, rainbows and fairy dust won’t convince me that HarperCollins loves libraries and library patrons right now.”

“HC’s position is that because e-books won’t wear out, libraries will buy fewer replacement copies and the publishers’ revenues and authors royalties will suffer.”

“The concept of measuring the lifespan of a physical object to a digital object is incomparable. It’s as if to say that DVDs and VHS have the same lifespan (or now e-movies), etc. Apples to oranges.
Libraries are being terribly underfunded right now and face constant attack, and for a publisher to make this move at such a financially difficult time for public services does not show respect for libraries.”

And so on. What do you think?