Month: March 2012

Bobby Newman has a great post getting a lot of traffic today, titled Should Libraries Get Out of the eBook Business. I commented on her post, but wanted to include my thoughts here as well, with the idea of expanding upon them in the near future. My comment:

The problem is DMCA and what it stops us from doing in terms of fair use and the first sale doctrine. The solution is to get libraries and library organizations to use whatever muscle they can to get DMCA overturned or to get exceptions written in for fair use and first sale cases.

And while that was very easy and simple to write, I realize that it may well be impossible, or at least very difficult, to accomplish.

In the meantime, I agree to the extent that we should stop paying whatever publishers ask us to pay for the right to take it up the [censored]. Accepting rising costs and increased restrictions just encourages the publishers to punish us more, and we’re not creating a space from which we can negotiate.

I’m an ePatron, though. If my public library didn’t have eBooks, they’d never see my patronage. What I’d love to see happen is some sort of coordinated rebellion; MARC records loaded for ebooks from publishers who are being unreasonable that leads to a website explaining exactly how that publisher sucks and with concise, clear instructions on how to find and download their books illegally from torrent sites.

It’s not a perfect solution, clearly. But it would sure be nice to stick it to them, just a little bit.