ALA decries Hachette’s 104 percent library e-book price increase
Printer-friendly versionFor Immediate Release
Fri, 09/14/2012 - 11:09
Contact: Jazzy Wright
Washington Office (wo)
Washington, D.C.— The American Library Association (ALA) denounces Hachette Book Group’s reported decision to raise the price of e-books to the library market starting Oct. 1. ALA President Maureen Sullivan issued the following statement:
“When Hachette announced it was stepping back into the library e-book market this past May with pilots that would bring a selection of its recent best-sellers to millions of library patrons, the ALA welcomed this news. Leaving our meeting with them, we were pleased that they recognized libraries as strong partners—as direct customers and marketers of their titles, as well as integral community institutions that must be supported as a fundamental cornerstone of literacy.
“After these tentative steps forward, we were stunned to learn that Hachette plans to more than triple its prices for e-book sales to libraries starting October 1. Now we must ask, ‘With friends like these…?’
“We are weary of faltering half steps and even more so of publishers that refuse to sell e-book titles to libraries at all. Today I have asked the ALA’s Digital Content & Libraries Working Group to develop more aggressive strategies and approaches for the nation’s library community to meet these challenges.
“Libraries must have the ability to purchase a wide range of digital content at a fair price so that all readers have full access to our world’s creative and cultural resources, especially the many millions who depend on libraries as their only source of reading material.”
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Comments
another thought...
While I understand the frustration of how the publishing industry is working or not-working with libraries, in this case I think the reaction may be incorrect.
Ebooks can be catalogued and uploaded to our various ebook services almost instantaneously. Libraries can track usage and hold paterns in real time and respond to customer use patterns quickly with almost instantaneous results.
With a 220 percent increase it means libraries need to change their buying habits, it is no longer necessary to guess at a books success due to the often months lead time to order, catalogue and process a new item. Instead purchasing one copy per location or per library and then respond as demand increases.
Publishers are struggling to come up with new ways of pricing their products. Now libraries also need to be looking at how the ebook universe can change how we provide resources to our customers.
Faster ordering of multiple copies vs. depth of collections?
The comments by the previous poster about some of the possible ‘up-sides’ of ebook collection development (more Just-In-Time delivery, as it were) are nice and all, but it reminds me of what my colleagues that order DVDs are confronted with: They have been told to buy multiple copies of very popular titles (like Transformers, or Twilight saga) rather than look to add depth and feature lesser works. Our budgets eat themselves in this manner, making our collections narrow and less open to the new and untried. Ultimately, there is only so much money for anything, books, ebooks, audio on CD or MP3, or DVD/BluRay, et al. The more they charge, the less we can acquire. And, the more we chase meeting demand for hyper-popular titles (ordered on the fly to respond to that demand), the less there is to discover and expand one’s horizons with at the library.
I already have (almost) one-click buying for items with our vendors, and there’s POD programs, and the lot. Fine. Higher ebook prices have NOTHING to do with that. In fact, POD and streamlining of acquisition should be saving every one in the system money. But, funny, that’s not what we’re seeing. Prices go UP instead.
It’s not about the time it takes to print and acquire; it’s all about the money. If all I get from this new reality is a faster way to buy more copies of “50 shades of grey”, there’s no #winning in this scenario. It’s more about breaking the Fair Use model and making textual works more like software — if they can price them as licensed content, they hope that libraries will go away completely. So, meh. Not impressed with your argument.