More on Ebooks and Libraries

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here's another article about how libraries and publishers are failing to meet reader needs, particularly in regards to ebooks.

Basically, if you aren't meeting people's needs, they will find somebody else who will.  If your economic model isn't meeting people's needs, they'll replace it with one that will.  If your system isn't managing the main flow of activity, it's a failure, and the real system is wherever that main activity is.  What we're seeing now in the shakeup of the publishing/literature industry -- and to some extent, media in general -- is the process of consumers declaring that the current options don't meet their needs and they're exploring other options, kthxbai.

You aren't going to make money by trying to trap people where they don't want to be and aren't getting their needs met.  You need to find a way to meet their needs and make a reasonable profit in the process; you need to go where the interest and activity are.  You also need to treat people decently, and expect them to behave decently.  If you mistreat them, they will not hesitate to mistreat you in return and you will have no moral high ground to complain about it.

I'm keeping my eye out for a subscription-based e-library where you can read whatever you want that's in the stacks without the stupid restrictions that the libraries, publishers, and software are currently promoting.

Comments

[laylalawlor.livejournal.com]

Just like they're an inconvenient way to read real books; inconvenient enough that people who can afford to will buy the books instead.

Mmmm, the phrasing here makes it sound like inconvenience is intentionally built into libraries to push people to buy their own copies of books, either that or inconvenience is a beneficial side effect that we (as authors) ought to support, and either way, I disagree. Most of the inconvenience of libraries (limited terms for book checkout, having to go to a central location to get them) is a side effect of cost and space limits for physical books. The library can't afford to purchase multiple copies of a single book, or deliver them personally to your door. With digital copies, that's going to change, and I don't think it benefits me as an author to try to force the library back into a model that works very well for hard-copy books, but isn't the only way or the best way to handle digital books. Over the last few hundred years in the West, we've developed this very standardized idea of what a library is and what it does and how it works. But there's no reason why it has to work that way -- it's developed out of the physical medium of hard-copy books, and the culture that's grown up around them.

Basically I guess that I'm saying that I can't see why a library couldn't look and function completely differently than the libraries we have now, and still be a library, and still be good for authors, even if it doesn't rely on the traditional library model.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I think that libraries had better find a way to adapt and remain relevant to people's needs, or they will cease to exist, and that would really suck.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

My prediction is that they'll turn into public net access portals? That's what most of my friends use them for, that use them at all.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Well, what they *can't* do is give out unlimited free e-books for people to read over the net, which is what the not-deliberately-annoying version of them would do. I mean, barring legal issues, that would be easier than anything less convenient. So they *have* to be deliberately annoying in one way or another.

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I think free ebooks should be an option. Why not? More and more writers are offering at least one free ebook. "Make a free ebook" is an increasingly common piece of advice to new bloggers or people launching a topical website.

Why? It gives people a nice big chunk of your work, so they know that you actually know what you're talking about. That's advertising. It's a great choice for anyone who writes fast enough that they can afford to give away a free sample. It's a great use for anything that's cool but is too nichey to sell easily. It's a great use for stuff that was bought and published a long time ago, since re-releasing it takes little extra work. You just include somewhere in there some information about your current work that people can BUY. Readers do get hooked this way.

People will read for free stuff that they wouldn't pay to read, which is why libraries exist in the first place. A big bundle of free ebooks would make terrific bait. Then maybe people would think, "Okay, I've read the stuff I want from this list of books I can copy and keep. I wonder if any of the same authors/publishers have more stuff in the ebooks I have to check out for two weeks. Oh yeah, they do!" And they'd go read those books. Or maybe they'd go out to the author's or publisher's website and buy some books, like they go to a bookstore if they really like a library book now.