I love e-books! I’d check them out from my local library more often if I could, but it seems like there’s always a backlog of holds for the popular ones. Why is that? Turns out, it’s complicated. Today on Stacks & Facts, we explore why libraries sometimes struggle to meet their patrons’ demands for e-books.
Sources
- Kindle Store Terms of Use
- Sue-happy RIAA
- e-Book costs for libraries
- E-book sales dropping
- Print sales rising
Special thanks to
- Aven from Alliterative for looking over my script and giving feedback!
- Humanware for providing me with high-res images of their braille displays
Trivia
- The shirt I’m wearing in this video is from Blaine Public Library, a library that sits almost right on the border of the US and Canada (on the US side)! I actually bought it earlier that day after randomly swinging by and chatting with Debby, the branch manager. I thought it was a nice color.
- Originally for the “Tale of Two Licenses” I was going to make a PDF of a mock e-book cover, take pics of it loaded on my Kindle, and use that as the thumbnail, but it didn’t look great.
- This is the first video of mine where I also added a translation of the title and description into Spanish and Chinese.
Viewer contributions
- user quentinfool shared the following, which is an important development about Tor decided to start a 4-month embargo on e-books in libraries (that is, libraries will have to wait for 4 months after an ebook is released before they can offer it to their patrons). Definitely worth a listen:
“Tor books recently made a radical ebook/library policy change that I found in this podcast : [Beyond the Book] An E-books Embargo For Libraries http://podplayer.net/?id=53111608“