P.S. I’m not talking immediately, but this is the future by 2020 in my humble opinion.

On to other things however…Publishers are intentionally making it hard on libraries because they want them to not exist. One of the CEO’s at one of the big six publishers admitted he could not care less about the American library system and that it had been a thorn in the publishing industries side for 150 years now. Needless to say there is no help coming from that direction.

What will help is consumers contacting publishers and letting them know if they can’t find their books and brands in their local libraries then they won’t be shopping with those publishers no matter what. We the people will make this decision and our libraries will stand or fall by it.

HarperCollins and Penguin are two of the worst of the big publishers who are preventing libraries from doing their primary job in the curating and collecting of interesting content for their communities which books in an electronic should make so much more easy and economic…except when old world publishers determined to maintain old world business models impede progress.

Let me give you an example. The aforementioned library in NY has a trial deal with Penguin where they get an ebook at cost and can lend it for a year before the ebook expires. How is this acceptable to anyone who is spending our tax money? As a tax payer, I expect content my government purchases to be available from that point on unless something occurs to damage said content. Since it would be extremely difficult to destroy a data file in a protected environment, I expect said content to be available from that point on…..not held hostage by some company who is more interested in making money off something for decades and even centuries. When I make something at work, I get paid for it then and there. What I don’t do is keep getting paid for it year after year and I certainly don’t respect Penguin for pushing this model on the library system.

I have already written all the authors I read who are signed with Penguin and let them know that I will not be reading their works published through Penguin until the company starts treating libraries like any other customer…and I as a customer would never buy and time limited, expiring ebook!

Nice article, but you’re missing a couple of angles here, both of which add up to more bad news for libraries in the future: the legal angle, which gives publishers all of the power in determining what libraries may e-lend, and the fact that the private sector is now competing with libraries in e-lending, starting with Amazon Kindle Owners Lending Library. See my articles http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2011/12/04/a-bleak-future-for-public-libraries-and-e-books/ and http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2012/05/20/a-nail-in-public-libraries-coffins/ for more details.