Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yes, they can. And do.
A publisher can sell you a book directly at full price, while a retailer slashes the price by 50% or 75%. It happens all the time, with retailer discounts, used books and remaindered books.
Sure. They have to pay their taxes and obey the laws, just like everyone else.
If I self-publish a book, I get full control over how that book is distributed. I am not legally or morally required to provide the public with anything. If I decide I don't want libraries to distribute my book, should I be forced to do so?
Why stop at imposing extra duties on publishers? What's so special about libraries, since there are so many public goods? Why not require gasoline companies to provide gas for free to fire departments? Free bullets to police? Free medicines to hospitals?
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Actually within reason, yes, you should be forced to sell to libraries. Within reason, if you are targeting a large enough portion of the public, you don't have a right to not sell your product to catagory of someone.
A great example is Netflix, Redbox, et al. Warner Brothers and others have come out with 30 day and starting soon in some cases 60 day blackouts in when Netflix, Redbox and others can rent new releases. However, that only applies to movies sold to those companies through wholesale rental copy deals with them. The companies can go out and buy the movies at retail price and rent them to their hearts content day 1 without the movie publishers being able to say a thing.
Within reason, libraries versus publishers should/is the exact same situation, but it isn't playing out that way. I firmly believe electronic media, software, etc should be treated exactly how physical media is. If the library can legally purchase a book and lend it, then there should be nothing stopping them from buying the ebook however they want and lending it. Yes, there are some additional strings attached when it comes to electronic means.
It isn't ethical, let alone legal (and grey area there) to buy a single ebook and lend it concurrently to multiple people. However, my public library damn well should be able to buy 50 copies of a kindle book off Amazon and lend it up to 50 times at once without anyone being able to tell them differently.