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Originally Posted by darryl
I find this interesting for a couple of reasons. MacMillan was in the spotlight for its experimentation with libraries and suffered substantial adverse publicity before its back-down for which it blamed the Coronavirus. But it appears PRH is also playing games with libraries on at least some books. Secondly, it is interesting to see the Audiobook edition available in libraries whilst the e-book edition is not. This is disappointing but hardly surprising. I wonder to what extent other publishers are windowing their e-book releases, and whether PRH is also adopting this approach in the US.
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The “substantial adverse” publicity is a bit of a stretch. Yes groups made a stink about it, but most major library systems didn’t publicly change their buying habits nor did they weigh in heavily. It’s also rather unlikely that this publicity was the root cause of their change in policy. The world changed with COVID-19, they changed with it likely not as just a PR move but because in the new normal ebooks would see an increased demand and paper would see a drop. Thus it’s more profitable for them to proceed with selling more licenses to libraries.
While it’s old in terms of new releases, the last book of wheel of time was entirely withheld as an ebook for quite some time after the physical and audio had been released. This was at the behest of the rights holder due to, her, IMO mistaken, belief that the ebook would cause the physical to not hit the NYT number one bestseller slot (a system which is so plagued with issues that it’s become almost irrelevant anyway). Meanwhile this did not represent any of the plans or intentions of the publisher.
Further on point you’ve cited a singular case and seem to be trying to use it as an indication of a whole plan from a major company. And it’s an arguably poor example given its genre. Unless there’s some messaging from Viking or PHR on a change in their policies or more widespread examples of this from them it’s likely an outlier and fairly meaningless.