That slight trembling sensation you feel beneath your feet is Johannes Gutenberg spinning in his grave like the plate cylinder on a high-speed Ryobi 3304 four-color press.
What’s got ‘The Goot’ wound up so tight? E-books, seemingly. Sure, digital dialogue has been around for more than 20 years, but it’s mostly in the last decade that volumes published in volts have begun plugging in at your local lending library. Rather than borrowing the latest James Patterson pot-boiler or self-help scripture bound in cumbersome and flammable cellulose, folks can snatch it lightly from the Internet for free via their local book repository.
It’s not your parents’ library, no ma’am, and depending on whom you ask the shotgun wedding of public libraries and e-books is either a bright new chapter in the story of the Information Age or the worst thing that’s happened to the written word since the paper louse. Either way, it’s a tale still young in the telling, and whether the end is written in black ink or 1s and 0s has yet to be seen.
The Jefferson County Public Library (JCPL) logged on to e-books back in 2006. Just so all we analog-rodytes are on the same page, here’s how it works.
Publishers – Hachette and HarperCollins are two of the biggest on the e-block – provide digital readables to online clearinghouses like Overdrive and 3M Cloud Library, which make them available to your local library by contract. The library doesn’t actually purchase e-books the way it does its physical copies, instead leasing the right to lend them under very specific terms. Leasing fees vary by title, and publishers can limit the number of times an e-book may be circulated before a fresh lease must be obtained.
Like just about everything else done on the Internet, checking out e-books is easily accomplished from anywhere, and at any time, with an absolute minimum personal investment. In Jeffco, it all starts with a quick trip to the “Downloads” page on JCPL’s website. First-time cyber-borrowers are asked to provide their library card number and select their e-reader of choice, such as Kindle, Nook, Android, iPhone, or whatchamajigger.
“Once you download the application that lets you check out e-books, you can check them out until the cows come home,” says JCPL spokewoman Rebecca Winning. “We have more than 50,000 titles available, both fiction and non-fiction, and we’re adding thousands more every month.”
Despite their insubstantial nature and infinite potential for reproduction, e-books behave a lot like the three-dimensional kind. Because each “copy” can be checked out to only one person at a time, popular titles will quickly form wait-lists. The standard loan period is three weeks, and at the appointed hour your e-book will quietly and instantly dissolve back into the electronic cloud from which it fell, making it impossible for even the most preoccupied patron to rack up so much as a nickel in late fees. E-books are fast, foolproof and free, and it makes one wonder why book publishers would allow their hottest new releases to be perused for nothing when they’re offering digital copies for sale.
“It’s a whole new model,” Winning explains. “It’s basically a new way of marketing, and what they’re seeing is that a lot of people will check out a book first, and then buy it.”
A recent study conducted in California’s Bay Area backs that up. More than half of regular e-book borrowers reported purchasing the last digital tome they borrowed, suggesting that while folks are pleased to get something for nothing, they’re also perfectly willing to pony up if they like the product.
“Publishers have to reach their customers, and the public library is an effective way for them to do that.”
For what it’s worth, the lavishly funded San Francisco Public Library offers nearly 700,000 titles in digital format, which is more e-books than the fabled Library of Alexandria had scrolls, although you probably won’t find Euclid or Archimedes gathering dust in ‘Frisco’s electronic archives. Jeffco has checked out nearly 39,000 e-books so far this year, and expects to round out 2014 with a cyber circulation in the neighborhood of 47,000. Granted, that’s something south of 5 percent of the county’s total circulation, but it’s still a whole bunch of pixilated prose.
Fast, flexible, free and no fees – what’s not to love? And yet the e-book lending paradigm has plenty of detractors, among them industry watcher Art Brodsky who takes issue with e-book pricing practices in a Wired.com article indelicately titled “The Abomination of Ebooks.”
“Sadly, pricing changes the game for library access,” Brodsky writes, “because e-book distributors have radically changed the pricing from that of regular books.”
The way Brodsky tell it, a newly released book by a top-selling author might in a brick and mortar environment retail for something like $15.49, or be purchased by a public library for around $14.40. The same book reduced to electrons would cost an online shopper a mere $6.50, while a library would be made to fork over about $78.00 – per digital copy – in leasing fees, and must then abide by such restrictions as are included between the lines.
“Somehow the ‘e’ in e-books changes the pricing game, and drastically,” grouses Brodsky. “How else does one explain libraries paying a $0.79 to $1.09 difference for a physical book to paying a difference of $71.50 just because it’s the electronic version? It’s not like being digital makes a difference for when and how they can lend it out.”
A good point, and one which Winning and her JCPL colleagues have pondered aplenty. Still, the Internet is forever, and if the world’s gone wacky for the Web then Jeffco has little choice but to embrace the madness.
“A library’s purpose is to offer equal access to information in whatever form it’s available, and people are getting their information from a variety of different channels,” Winning explains. “We want to meet the people where they are.”
It’s the 21st century, Johannes. Try to get some rest.
