Librarians passively protest stupid e-book lending policies from publishers
With the proliferation of gadgets like the iPad, the Kindle, and other types of e-readers the growth of e-books has risen fairly dramatically. It is a whole new way for us to get and read books like never before but for libraries there is a huge problem around e-books and their place in our society.
Many of the publisher that libraries buy their books from so that we can borrow them are instituting some really strange policies about libraries being able to lend e-books – they aren’t allowed to.
Yes you read that right. Book publishers have told libraries that they can not lend e-books, even though a number of e-readers are able to deal with that technical problem. This of course has librarians very upset and concerned as was recently outlined by Sara Houghton director of the San Rafael Public Library, on the library’s blog:
“Sadly, unlike a regular person, a library cannot pay Amazon or Barnes & Noble for an eBook and then lend it out to people. We can buy a printed book from these companies, stick it on the shelf, and lend it out–but digital content is treated differently by the publishers and the companies who manage digital content licensing. We desperately want to offer you these eBooks. But the companies won’t let us. As your library, we commit to continuing advocacy for change in these policies.”
As you can see from the list in the images that Houghton has made available for other libraries to download and use all the major publishing companies that would do business with libraries are included.
via GalleyCat
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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