What counts for the head librarian in a public library is the total number of book-borrowings during the year by the local citizens. This is the only figure that truly justifies the public library’s annual budget. They call this “circulation” figures because the books “circulate”. Other figures, like the number of people sitting inside the library on average, are shakier and not as useful. In order to keep that borrowing number high public libraries have to constantly buy new books, new titles even if the older books aren’t physically used up. They have to keep up constantly with what’s really popular in fiction and what’s current, updated to new standards in non-fiction. There,s always new Science, new techniques coming up, which make non-fiction books obsolete even before they are physically worn out.

In most libraries in North America there are regular sales of weeded books, that is books which are not physically used up but which are not popular any more (such as the last decade’s hit pop fiction or last year’s outdated reference volume) and are taking up costly shelf space in heated and air conditioned buildings. I’ve been going to those sales for more than thirty years, buying thousands of books for my personal collection, my personal library. For each used library book I’ve bought I’ve seen or handled a hundred other books in those sales. From this experience (and from readings when I did university studies on the matter) I can tell you that most of those outdated and/or unpopular “weeded” books were still in fine physical shape when they were taken out of the library collection, to make space for new titles or updated editions.

I’ve read that a lot of publishers and authors don’t like bookstores that specialize in selling used, recently used books because they say that there’s zero money going to the publisher and the author when somebody buys a used book, “their” used book from one of those stores. It means that a reader gets to own “their” book for nothing, in their point of view. So I reckon that they don’t like it either when libraries sell weeded books.

Making the transition to an eBook library means that there will not be any more “weeded” book sales. Hey, publishers and authors should be glad!

But that’s not all.

Since eBooks don’t take up any space librarians won’t be forced to “weed” the collections like they do now, because of lack of space. In theory, they could keep some of those eBook files forever if they retain the files on their own servers, just in case a user might want to se them in the future, for historical reasons. And this is the crucial point. 99% of users don’t want to see those old books for historical reasons. They want to read popular new fiction and consult updated reference books, trustworthy and recent “how-to ” manuals and other such stuff. It all about having you users, your citizens borrow stuff, keep circulation figures high, so you can justify the library’s existence. Librarians will go on buying new books to do this no matter what their format, eBook, or physical monograph or whatnot.

Publishers should get this into their head: The total number of books a public library owns is largely irrelevant for its existence. University libraries and national libraries brag about their total number of books and it’s important for them, but for a public library (those we are talking about here) it’s irrelevant for their survival. What counts is getting new books in, all the time, to keep borrowing figures high. They’ll go on buying books even their “old” ones are still intact, so stop bothering them with useless borrowing limits and other DRM obsessions.

Oh, and another thing, all, and I mean absolutely all the statistics show that in North America the towns and cities with the highest borrowing figures in their public libraries are also the ones where the population buys the most books. It’s proven by exact numbers that the love of reading is a “disease” spread by libraries and beneficial to publishers. Many publishers figured this out long, long ago and put up special marketing departments targeting public libraries in particular. I’m beginning to wonder if the people in thses departments were laid off when big publishers were consolidated and bougth out by companies with no publishing background.

I’m at an academic library, and we don’t have Overdrive, and I’m happy we don’t. We do catalog CC-licensed books that we think our community will enjoy, though.

Every librarian should send the link back to HC.

And HC – admit you’re profit-mongers, but please don’t try to lie to us about what is patently obvious.

Another swindle for the rich to get richer.
This MAY be a biased selection of books, though. :/
I like to think that they weren’t trying to be fraudulent in any way in the making of this video. Seems pretty straight-forward.

Also, sake and grape juice tastes like grape juice.

The folks I feel most sorry for in this are the authors with books at HC. If they go through with this, libraries should drop HC ebooks.

And thank you to BoingBoing for highlighting this

However, it seems to me that libraries prefer hardcovers or at least some of the new plastic based covers that do not crease.

Based on your earlier post the lifespan of a book was only one of many factors.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/25/harpercollins-to-lib.html

“Josh Marwell, President, Sales for HarperCollins, told LJ that the 26 circulation limit was arrived at after considering a number of factors, including the average lifespan of a print book, and wear and tear on circulating copies.”

http://y42k.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/harpercollins-tells-us-what-ebooks-are-really-worth/

E-books are EXACTLY like that.

But they put that out as a particular reason, and have not stated what the other reasons are, so it is quite reasonable to dispute their claim.

The unmentioned factors were “How big of greedy douchebags are we” and “How badly do we want to screw over libraries”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Fold

Shh, don’t tell HarperCollins.

In the present many of them are already.

We’d really really like to work out something equitable and fair with publishers, but treating libraries — one of the largest purchasers of books in the US — as an annoying problem that publishers have to barely tolerate is framing the issue in the worst possible way.

OverDrive has been trying to do the right thing here, but they’re in a terrible place. I hope HarperCollins feels the bite and comes back to the table with realistic alternatives.

We will need many more librarians.

A big part of this debate comes from a blind allegiance to the “Pretend it’s Print” model. (For a more thorough explanation, see http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2010/12/lots-of-markets-lots-of-business-models.html) ebooks aren’t like print books, and it’s going to create a lot of changes in the way books are used, both from the publisher end and the library end.

Go to the nearest library and look up “sarcasm”.