March, 2020 was the only month that our Mystery Book Club did not meet (in some fashion) since its beginning more than 20 years ago. That month we read The Forgotten Garden and I asked people to post their book comments on this website because the pandemic had struck. By April, I had purchased a Zoom account and figured out (mostly, LOL) how to use it. But the library had stopped loaning books for a few months. How to get books into your hands?
I remember buying used books online, unpacking them, and wiping them with disinfectant on my back deck, slipping them into book mailing envelopes, and sending them out to those of you willing to have them. But I also advised you to use digital editions of the books such as Overdrive.
Overdrive is a great resource if you are not in a hurry – like needing it THIS month. The reason is that each and every library that purchases a subscription to the books must “loan” the library use privilege to one patron at a time. (I think that it could be more than one depending on the amount paid for the subscription.) In any case, if all club members want to use it for the same book at the same time it won’t work – you will likely be offered a chance to be on a waiting list. The same concept is true of e-books and movies available via the library on Hoopla. On Hoopla, patrons are limited to the number of loans in a month; fortunately MBTS has the highest level subscription so that binge watching a series is very doable.
Library consortiums (like the Merrimac Valley Library Consortium – MVLC – to which our MPL belongs) are probably even more annoying to publishers. For example, if you can’t borrow a book through Overdrive because another MBTS library patron is using it, you can use the subscription of any other MVLC library that has bought a digital copy on Overdrive.
Publishers tolerate libraries buying a physical book and loaning it to multiple readers a year. Naturally they’d be richer if everyone had to buy their own books. But physical books limit loaning by their very nature. At best, a book might go out 20 times in a year.
But digital books are different. If it is available for free download on an “online library,” in theory millions of people could acquire the free book in the same month. End of publisher income. End of writers’ incomes! That’s why, although publishers have never been happy about digital books, they accept them as long as the buyer’s use of a digital copy is restricted. (Like buying on Kindle. You can’t loan that copy to multiple friends as you might with a physical copy.)
All of this is background to tell you about what happened to Internet Archive. This is a huge digital lending library which publishers tolerated only because it restricted loans of a digital book copy to one person at a time.
But at the start of the pandemic, they implemented a “National Emergency Library” whereby they lifted all borrowing restrictions – no wait list! News of this led me to recommend using the Archive to access copies of Eye of the Needle in April, 2020. And periodically since then. I even made a video to help club members learn how to best find and use books on the site.
So I was surprised to learn that the owner of the Internet Archive was sued by HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and John Wiley & Sons -a group of major publishers- for “willful mass copyright infringement.” They sued over 127 titles, many by well-known writers, including J.D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, James Patterson, John Grisham and Malcolm Gladwell. They asked damages of $150,000 a book. The publishers claim that an agreement filed on Friday went far beyond dropping the 127 titles from the archive to also removing their “full book catalogs.” The whole matter is being appealed.
I learned about this from an interesting New York Times article. The article talks about the balance of copyright protections and the right to access information. I highly recommend this article! Libraries vs Publishers and Authors! Fascinating and thought provoking.
After reading the Times article, do you have an opinion one way or the other?
