Re: Column on licenses

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

Joe,

about half the books a university library buys are never read. 
This has been known for half a century now, and seems to be 
general. (The difficulty for a selector is predicting the right 
half.) It is possible for a library to buy only if requested, and 
facilitating this is one of the good things about e-books. The 
result, of course, will be that half the books requested are 
never used again.

This is one of the consequences of Lotka's Law, which applies to 
books as well as to journal articles.

If the OSU library did not buy a particular book, the publisher 
would most likely get nothing at all from the OSU market. There 
are many academic books whose sole purchasers are libraries 
(except for a few dozen specialist faculty), because the pricing 
spiral applies to books as well as journals, and the cost of 
research monographs, just like the cost of research journals, has 
become too great for both students and faculty, unless they have 
a special need.

As with non-academic books, a few become best-sellers, and then 
the price is such that individuals buy (generally it is possible 
to spot them in publishers catalogs--they are the ones that also 
come out in paperback, that year or the following. )

A few become widely used in reserve, and then the library either 
buys a number of copies in paperback, or buys the appropriate 
multi-user rights for an e-book. For an e-book read by only one 
user at a time, there is no reason multi-user rights are 
appropriate or necessary, any more than multiple copies would be.

Before indulging in poetic economics, it is advisable to know 
something about the actual situation.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
previously:
Bibliographer and Research Librarian
Princeton University Library

dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, October 21, 2006 10:20 pm
Subject: Re: Column on licenses
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> Toby:
>
> I admire the energy and creativity you have put into your
> program, but none of it is going to stop publishers and authors
> from sueing Google or anybody else who scans in-copyright works.
>
> Here is a scenario.  You are the publisher of Thomas Friedman's
> The World is Flat.  You sell one copy to Ohio State for $25.
> The book is scanned and put on a server, for viewing by any
> member of the Ohio State community.  I haven't checked the
> numbers; how many people is that?  75,000?  100,000?  Why do I
> smell a lawsuit in the works?
>
> Another scenario:  you publish a scholarly monograph with an
> initial printing of 800 copies.  A library purchases it, scans
> it, and makes it available to members of its community?  A
> lawsuit?  Dumb idea, but on the other hand, there is the issue of
> setting a precedent.
>
> Third scenario:  you publish a narrative history (say, a
> biography of Andrew Mellon, which I just saw today in a
> bookstore) for $35.  You print 20,000 copies.  When a library
> purchases it, the library has the option of getting extended
> rights.  For $200 the library's community gets ereserve, ILL, and
> digital coursepack rights.  For $1,000 the library gets LAN
> rights for its entire community.  These licenses are totally
> automated:  go to a Web site, enter your institution's name (or
> Hazel Henderson's or Atypon's DOI), choose the license you want,
> wait for the service to verify with WorldCat that you purchased a
> copy of the hardcopy, and have your institution's PayPal account
> debited. I have no idea what the right prices are, and I know for
> a fact that some publishers will try everything possible to wring
> every possible dollar out of this; but over time conventions for
> pricing will arise.
>
> Setting up a service like this will take a great deal of time and
> reflection, and the best service will not please everybody.  We
> can point out everything that is wrong with clearly articulated
> licenses and an attempt to come to fair pricing, or we can look
> for practical ways to get publishers and libraries on the, er,
> same page.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
> On 10/20/06, Toby.GREEN@oecd.org <Toby.GREEN@oecd.org> wrote:
>> Joe,
>>
>> Thanks for the clarifications. I missed the bit about hardcopy.
>> In fact we already offer e-books to anyone who purchases
>> hardcopy via our online bookshop (and we allow our distributors
>> to make the same offer too). We don't charge any more for this
>> service: simply put, the hardcopy purchasers can download the
>> e-book whenever they want and as often as they want from their
>> account. For some of our titles we also print Internet links in
>> the hardcopy to data files and other background information
>> that supplements the work. We don't impose any license on the
>> purchaser to access these e-resources (beyond the usual
>> copyright statements) and I think it would be impracticable to
>> do so unless we used the same sort of method as used by
>> software providers, i.e. some sort of "I agree" box at the foot
>> of a huge legal document that no-one ever reads which you have
>> to click before you can open the software. Does it stop users
>> pirating software? Or sharing it with their friends? Does it
>> stop large software vendors from being dragged through long
>> legal battles? I also have another practical problem - we sell
>> our books to clients in nearly every jurisdiction around the
>> world - how could I possibly (a) draw up a legal agreement that
>> would work everywhere since I can't afford a legal team the
>> size of Microsoft's and (b) how could I possibly enforce them
>> if I did? Surely the scale of this questioning of the limits to
>> copyright is such that it has to be handled systemically by
>> legislators rather than litigators?
>>
>> I agree that our business model is less likely to work for
>> books other than research monographs, conference proceedings
>> and the like. But I would like to correct the impression that
>> we're walking away from our hardcopy business - we're not,
>> because we never had a "hardcopy business". This may sound
>> pedantic, but it's a point worth making. Our business is the
>> same - providing information in an effective manner. So far I
>> haven't come across very many clients who express the need for
>> licenses as part of our service, and I'd hate for this to
>> change because our administrative costs would grow and we'd
>> have to pass this onto our customers.
>>
>> Toby Green
>> Head of Dissemination and Marketing
>> OECD Publishing
>> Public Affairs and Communications Directorate