A B.C. book publisher is experimenting with a new subscription service designed to resolve some of the issues that discourage owners of e-readers from borrowing electronic books from public libraries.
Meanwhile, the Vancouver Public Library has joined forces with other large libraries in North America in an effort to break a distribution monopoly that limits their ability to manage their own electronic collections.
Orca Book Publishers is working with the Greater Victoria Public Libraryon a new distribution model that would make it easier for patrons to find and borrow Orca e-books.
About 90% of the books Orca publishes are available in electronic format. Under a new pilot project, Victoria library patrons would be able to browse Orca’s collection, read them online and download books without having to place them on hold. The library would pay an annual subscription service.
Currently, libraries buy e-books from publishers. But there is a problem with distribution. Most e-books owned by Canadian libraries are distributed through a single American distributor: OverDrive. That makes it tough for libraries to promote books and for users to find them.
“There’s probably 2,000 B.C. published e-books available, but it’s not that simple for the libraries to find out how they get them,” said Margaret Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of B.C.
“For us the biggest challenge is visibility,” said Melanie Jeffs, director of digital products for Orca Books. “There is no physical shelf. Everybody’s experimenting right now, and I don’t think anyone’s found a successful model for discoverability.”
Thanks to an explosion in the use of e-readers and tablets, book publishers are now going through a paradigm shift similar to what the music industry started going through in the 1990s with the growth of MP3 players and file sharing.
There are still technical issues that make e-lending challenging. If you own a Kindle, for example, you can buy e-books from Amazon, but you can’t borrow those books from Canadian libraries.
If you own a Canadian-made Kobo, you can borrow e-books from your library, but will find the selection small (VPL has 2.2 million books, but just 20,000 e-books) and getting them onto your e-reader can be technically challenging.
The four big English language publishers, which print 50% of the bestsellers in North America, refuse to sell public libraries e-books, even when they’re available for sale in the ePub format.
You can buy the electronic version of Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs from Amazon or Kobo, for example, but you can’t borrow it in ePub format from any library, because the publisher (Simon & Schuster) won’t sell the ePub version to libraries.
Most of B.C.’s 40 book publishers are happy to sell their e-books to libraries, but finding, borrowing and downloading them can be a hassle.
“They [OverDrive] don’t make it easy for you to borrow a library book, and we want it to be easier,” said Christina de Castell, director of resources and technology for VPL and e-book task force member for the Canadian Urban Libraries Council.
“Because they’re an American company, it means all the sales are going through an American company, rather than supporting Canada’s book industry.”
The council is trying to encourage new e-book distributors to enter the field – preferably one that will give libraries control over their own electronic checkouts.
The council is also hoping to put public pressure on Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan Publishers to start selling e-books to public libraries.
Publishers are still wrangling with issues around territorial and author rights, but ultimately, de Castell said they fear that making e-books too easily available to libraries will ultimately erode their profit margins.
Because patrons don’t have to leave their homes to borrow or return an e-book and because there are no overdue fines to pay (e-books automatically expire), borrowing e-books could simply become too easy.
“If it’s too easy to borrow,” de Castell said, “no one will buy books anymore.” •
