Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
I'm not sure I see the point for limiting loans on library books. Sure, physical books you have to actually have the physical book to loan it out. But digital books? If ten people want to borrow it, loan it to all ten of them. If twenty want to borrow it, loan it to all twenty. Obviously, limiting the number of library loans is a solution to a problem, I just don't understand what the problem was. It must be to assure profits for somebody. Fine. When the library obtains an ebook for loaning, I'm pretty sure they have to pay for it. Give that payment to the publisher (that's probably what they already do). Then every loan of the ebook results in a 5 cent charge to the borrower. Half goes to the library and the other half to the author. That's probably a heck of a lot more payment to the author than the publishers ever give in the current system. With ebooks, there is no ongoing cost to the publisher. So I say, give them one payment per ebook copy up front, and then they're out of the picture. Any money after that goes to the author and the facility maintaining the loaning infrastructure (the library).
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Ummm... have you taken a look at the cost of an ebook to the library? One article showed a half dozen books that were $8.99 to $16.99 for individuals to purchase while libraries paid $64
to $117 for the same ebook but with limited numbers of loans and/or time period for those loans. Given that quite a few books are restricted either by time or number of loans with the same terms as your average auto warranty so something like 26 loans or 1 year. To purchase the rights to loan a second or third copy is marginally cheaper per copy. This is most of the reason that you will see popular new books at the library with 5 copies and after a year, only 1 or 2 copies.
So say the library offers a copy of a new ebook. Take "
The Radium Girls" by Kate Moore. On Kobo or Amazon, it would cost me $17.53 Cdn (Kobo will price match the price on Amazon.ca). The local library consortium has 2 copies for which they likely paid $211(*) for a total of 52 loans and/or 1 year. This works out to $4.07 Cdn for each loan. The question then becomes if you are willing to pay $4.07 per loan, just a bit more than your suggested 5 cents split between the library and the author. BTW, this book has 18 holds on it of which I am located at #5.
If more books were available on Overdrive's Cost per check out model, this might help since less popular books would have fewer checkouts and lower costs allowing more money to be allocated to more popular books with more checkouts.
(*) The $211 is not an actual figure but rather the price of the ebook to a consumer multiplied by the average multiplied cost to the library I was given by one library staffer. Some publishers have higher markups, some lower. The joys of licensing and not purchasing -- first sale doctrine does not apply to licenses -- so the publishers can gouge libraries with impunity.