The Spindle's End

So, I had an excellent time at Penguicon, and was really excited to see my panel on Library and Librarians in the Information Age so well attended. We had a lot of audience participation, and so didn't get to talk about everything we had on our list of issues. But, that's just more things for me to blog about, right?

First I'll recap what actually was covered before I move further afield. Libraries are repositories of information, and librarians are the caretakers, gatekeepers, and facilitators of these resources. It is there job to develop the collection, make sure the collection stays relevant to their service area, and to provide access to the collection to their patrons.

Libraries house a wide variety of materials. Nearly all libraries collect ink-and-paper books. A public district or community library will generally collect books for all ages in fiction and non-fiction. It is also now standard for libraries to stock CDs, as well as audio books in formats from cassette tape to CD to MP3. More and more libraries are stocking DVDs and BluRays, replacing video rental stores in their communities. Each of these materials comes with their own host of problems. First, they all take up space, and every library has limited space. My library (CADL) is actively weeding our video tape collection, because a video takes up the same space as three or four DVDs or BluRays. Book bindings do not last forever. Discs scratch, and can only be resurfaced a certain number of times. BluRays cannot be resurfaced at all. Any item that incurs water/liquid damage has the potential to grow mold. The upside to all of these materials is that the library owns them outright and can circulate them as they choose.

As technology changes, so are libraries. This brings us to the topic of biggest interest to the panel's audience: e-books and the library. For the moment, aside from small exceptions, there is one company all libraries work with for their digital collections: Overdrive. This is true for Canada as well as the United States. A library will contract with Overdrive, who will then house their digital collection on their servers, facilitate the buying of these materials from distributors and publishers, and provide the programming which allows library patrons to check out materials via their library card. Essentially, it is a complete privatization of a portion of library services. For the most part, libraries cannot opt out of this system, as there is nothing to replace it with. It is not cost effective for a library to try and duplicate these services in house. The cost of just paying someone to build the software alone is price prohibitive. But Overdrive does come with it's downfalls. Not all publishers sell their books to Overdrive, thereby cutting libraries off from their digital editions. This includes most of the Big Seix publishers. Those who are still selling to Overdrive are winnowing their bestseller list, so that e-book editions of major releases are not available to Overdrive and participating libraries until well after that book has released to retailers. It should also be noted that libraries are still free to buy print copies of these books at the same time retailers do, just no the digital copies. Overdrive, not the library, ultimately controls access to materials and those materials' DRM.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and is essentially a list of rules coded into digital media which restricts its use. Every publisher and distributor has different DRMs, but they often include not being able to freely copy the file. While you can own a paper-and-ink book outright, you often do not own an e-book outright. It comes with terms and conditions. For libraries, DRM always means a limit to how many circulations they own the book for. Once a certain number of people have checked that book out, the library no longer can loan it and must repurchase a licensing agreement. Those limits are also generally less than what an average print book can handle before it falls apart. Also terrifying from a censorship point of view: e-books are insanely susceptible to change. A publisher/distributor can go into the master file and change it, and those changes are reflected in all copies of this file (because with DRM, all copies remain linked together), often immediately and without your knowledge or permission as the 'owner' of that copy. While this is mainly limited to text corrections (typos, spelling, etc), it is very easy for this to turn into a dystopian nightmare. What happens when The Diary of Ann Frank that we know today turns into The Diary of Ann Frank that exists in North Korea? A reader may know that this is not the same book it once was, but will be unable to find any unchanged digital copy, at least legally. The only record of those changes would be in the printed book, provided they are still around.

In conclusion of the first part of this series, I'd point you over to Charles Stross's website and blog. Stross is an SFF author who often blogs about current technology and their potential ramifications. He's done a number of excellent articles on e-books, DRM, their benefits and their downfalls.