This article from a University of California digital librarian describing efforts from the New York Public Library is a wonderful counterpoint to the huffery and puffery from the Internet Archive. The NYPL is actually doing the hard work of complying with the law and working with creators and rightsholders, and innovating on everyone’s behalf along the way, while also managing to digitize and lend legally a corpus of works. Renata Ewing writes: “NYPL’s approach is to work collaboratively with authors and publishers to secure licenses to permit patrons to access in-copyright out-of-print works without impacting the commercial value of those […]
Libraries
HarperCollins Tests OverDrive’s Bulk Loan Bundles for “High-Demand Titles”
In these charged times, Overdrive has unfortunately timed a press release to the London Book Fair that should matter most to the US library market, giving some context to the contentiousness over publishers’ business relationships with library ebook lending. One strain of that dialog asserts that there is only one basis on which publishers license ebooks to libraries, while the marketplace has implemented a number of approaches to balancing libraries’ needs and budgets. In the announcement, Overdrive celebrates having launched a six-month pilot program with HarperCollins for over 150 “high-demand titles” in their OverDrive Max program that lets libraries “purchase […]
ALA Report: Book Ban Attempts Almost Doubled in 2022
The American Library Association released a new report on Thursday about the total amount of attempted book bans and restrictions in 2022, which they say almost doubled from the previous year. The AP writes, “More than 1,200 challenges were compiled by the association in 2022, nearly double the then-record total from 2021 and by far the most since the ALA began keeping data 20 years ago.” The ALA’s findings are based on media reports, as well as accounts from libraries, and they say “the numbers might be far higher.” Rather than attempting to ban or restrict access to one book […]
Bill to Limit Library E-Book Lending Fails in VA Senate
A bill failed in the Virginia state senate yesterday that would have prevented publishers from imposing limits on lending electronic material. The Committee on General Laws and Technology voted 15-0 to block the bill. The bill stipulated that a publisher’s contract with a library could not “Preclude…the Library from licensing any electronic literary material;” “Restrict the number of licenses for any electronic literary material that a library may acquire after the same item is made available to the public;” “Require a library to pay a cost-per-circulation fee to loan any electronic literary material, unless substantially lower in aggregate than the […]
For Weekend Reading and Permanent Collections
After a small hiccup, our librarian friends should be able to find and order our new ebook THE TRIAL: The DOJ’s Suit to Block Penguin Random House’s Acquisition of Simon & Schuster from Overdrive for your permanent collections. And all of our readers can enjoy the long fall weekend with a copy: Would you rather spend the time reading the full testimony of Markus Dohle, Jonathan Karp, Michael Pietsch, Madeline McIntosh, or someone else? Or perhaps you’ll jump ahead to the appendix of over 100 pages of emails and internal data and documents entered in evidence? Get yours at the […]
Buy or Borrow: The Trial, For Libraries
As promised last week, for our friends in the library community our landmark gigantic ebook on THE TRIAL: The DOJ’s Suit to Block Penguin Random House’s Acquisition of Simon & Schuster, is now available to libraries through OverDrive. The book should be of broad interest to authors, and of particular interest to academic libraries with courses and programs in publishing and writing. Meanwhile, the general ebook is widely available now: So far sales have been highest right from the shop at Publishers Marketplace (where you can choose an epub or a PDF, and send to Kindle if that’s your preferred reader), […]