In earlier blog entries I went on at length about how eBooks were going to change the book business and I puzzled over the role of Libraries providing their users with a pseudo-socialized way to “steal” books, mostly under the comic jab that Barnes & Noble should seek to shut down libraries because they eat into sales.
I also still think that downloading an eBook is virtually indistinguishable from going to the Library and borrowing a book. The destination I reached was a new principle called the Preservation of Inconvenience. That publishers need to maintain a certain basic level of “Being a Pain In The Ass”. To which, the link below points. It appears as though HarperCollins, in an effort to retain their basic level of “Being a Pain In The Ass” will count how many times a library lends out an eBook, and if it goes beyond 26 times, they’ll sell the eBook to the library AGAIN. Over and over.
So once again the old battle is joined. Consumers versus Producers, and the weapon of choice for the producers is Digital Rights Management. The best way to de-fang DRM is to only consume content in open formats. Accept nothing else.
this is obviously a big deal right now at our library, especially considering the recently announced state budget potentially cutting state funding for libraries even further than it has already been done.
Considering this is a technology that is still in relative infancy, I kinda feel like this is nothing more than a corporate entity trying to push the DRM envelope while the tech matures. This has happened over and over again with music, movies, games, and other entertainment media and I have no doubt at all that, like on-CD copy protection for music, this limited licensing bullshit is going to go the way of the dino quickly. There's already been a huge backlash, people threatening to boycott the company, etc.
One thing I'm fairly certain of: libraries are going to stop buying Harper-Collins titles in electronic format; that's not going to help ease the growing pains of this technology. As a paper book fan, this actually makes me pretty happy. 🙂