I must confess from the very beginning that I am not familiar with internal dealings between publishers and authors or with the libraries. Nevertheless, I support the HarperCollins policy. Seeing how the readership of ebook is growing, allowing public libraries to offer loans of ebooks without limit is detrimental to any good business venture. CNN living reported how ebook lending is growing. In New York Public Library alone, the number of ebook downloads from the website grew to about 81% in the last twelve months, and this is the trend for the over 9,000 public library system all over the country. Therefore, they posed an important question: “why should someone pay for an ebook if they can download it for free from a library website?” To be fair to publishers, this is not a good business module. If this is left unchecked, digital publishers will go out of market because of lack of revenue.
Harper Collins is not advocating a total abolishing of allowing ebooks to be checked out, but that there should be some limits to it and I support that. It is my opinion therefore that this should be regulated to allow the publishers to have resources to be able to publish more digital content.
Sources
Steve Kastenbaum ( Wed October 26, 2011) eBook lending: Libraries go digital. CNN living, Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/26/living/digital-libraries/index.html
Filed under: Instructional technology, Internet, Media, New Media
