How do those restrictions reinforce the divide between the haves and the have-nots?
Imagine walking into a library or bookstore and needing three or four different pairs of glasses to read different books made for specific display equipment. Or buying a book and then having to arbitrarily destroy it after, say, two weeks. That’s crazy. But it is the current situation we find ourselves in with e-books.
#### Brodsky Art
##### About
Art Brodsky, former president of the Montgomery County Library Board, an advisory group that promotes a strong and vibrant library system, is a communications consultant and library advocate. Previously, he was communications director for Public Knowledge, a public interest group working on Internet and copyright issues.
The high costs of e-book prices
The other way e-books reinforce the divide is through their pricing structures. The only ones who win are the big e-tailers, not the authors or even the publishers and definitely not the libraries.
Publishers are also subject to the pricing (and other whims) of large e-tailers. This issue was at the center of the antitrust case between Apple and Amazon, where Apple was found guilty of price fixing for working with publishers to raise e-book prices because the publishers were angry that Amazon had set prices too low.
Unfortunately, pricing is a complete game-changer for library access because e-book distributors have radically changed prices for regular books.
Take the example of JK Rowling’s pseudonymous book, The cuckoo’s song. For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 to book distributor Baker & Taylor, close to Barnes & Noble’s $15.49 consumer price and Amazon’s $15.19. But while the e-book will cost consumers $6.50 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, libraries would pay $78 (through e-book distributors Overdrive and 3M) for the same.
In some ways, the “e” in e-books changes the pricing game, and dramatically. How else do you explain that libraries pay a difference of $0.79 to $1.09 for a physical book and pay a difference of $71.50 Just because it’s the electronic version? Not that being digital makes a difference in when and how they can lend it out.
On another note: Random House raised the prices of its e-books for libraries by 300 percent last year, and HarperCollins limits the number of loans per e-book. This means that libraries have to lease another “copy” when they reach a certain threshold… like the e-book has died or something. In fact, that is the problem that some authors have with electronic books: not only that they make less money with them, but “they never degrade. They are perpetual. That directly harms writers,” as the historian and novelist has observed David O. Stewart. .
These authors don’t care about the high prices they charge libraries because they don’t even like libraries to begin with. Stewart has called libraries “undeniably socialist” because books can be loaned out (for free!) many times over, costing writers money from allegedly lost sales. This is the same justification that book publishers use to distort e-book prices.
But that’s just wrong. Most physical books in libraries are not tattered or worn, especially hardcover ones. And just because an e-book can last forever doesn’t mean it will be read. Reader demand changes with the cultural context: When? The help was at the top of the Times fiction best-seller list for 15 weeks in 2011, readers had to wait weeks for copies to return to their libraries; but now, 39 of the 79 copies of the book in my local library system are available for loan.
