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MacMillan restricting libraries' ability to purchase ebooks


dornishpen

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I love Libby (Overdrive) but the wait times on audiobooks finally forced me into a Scribed membership. I tend to think this is yet another example of old media failing to properly adapt to a new paradigm and instead they clutch at and and lord over things, maintaining the profit but killing the potential for more ... and maybe even killing the industry itself.

 

That said, I've never looked into the finances of it and, as an accountant working closely with supply chain at a larger entity, I'm well aware of the fact that the complexity of all this can be far different than one might assume. Still, I think they're missing something significant here.

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15 hours ago, kairparavel said:

Ha!  In the meantime the library has severely limited both holds and loans of e-audio.  OTOH it's made a deal with the evil EBSCO to provide at home with library card access to research sources like the NY Times archive and JSTOR.  For these high end digital archives and sources  (not all resources, by any means, and the NYPL has a lot of very valuable sources besides these) one had to be IN the NYPL to access them, unlike university libraries, where access from home has been the course for a long time.

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Publishers and authors protest the "Internet Archive" making their books available for free download:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/books/internet-archive-emergency-library.html

Quote

 

Ms. Lepore, who wrote in The New Yorker that other collections should follow Internet Archive’s lead, said she viewed the emergency library as a worthwhile effort to help teachers and students who were confronting an urgent educational crisis. “People who can afford to buy books should be buying books right now,” Ms. Lepore said in an email. “But, meanwhile, in addition to a public health emergency, there is an educational emergency.”

Still, some organizations that represent authors and publishers said the effort could do more harm to the publishing industry at a time of economic crisis.

“They’re operating without any permission whatsoever from authors or publishers who own the copyright for these works,” said Maria Pallante, the president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. “It’s blatant infringement.”

The Authors Guild also slammed the National Emergency Library, arguing that Internet Archive was using the public health crisis to “advance a copyright ideology that violates current federal law and hurts most authors.”

Mary Rasenberger, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said that Internet Archive’s decision to give readers unlimited access to its online collection violated intellectual property laws. “All they’ve done is scan a lot of books and put them on the internet, which makes them no different from any other piracy site,” she said. “If you can get anything that you want that’s on Internet Archive for free, why are you going to buy an e-book?”

 

 

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