For the March 2013 edition of the ebook price report, Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries went back to look at the New York Times bestseller list. An interesting new addition to the list is a book (Wait for Me)from Smashwords, an aggregator of independently published works, as well as two other independent titles available only as ebooks.
For the first time in this series of reports, we have encountered two New York Times bestsellers that libraries cannot purchase. Not just as ebooks—libraries simply cannot purchase them. Digital-only titles do not fall under the first sale doctrine of copyright law. In these two cases (Hard to Resist and If You Stay), there is no print version to fall back upon.
Not that libraries are missing all that much based on some of the reviews from Amazon. As one single-star review noted about Hard to Resist, “the editing was awful. There were too many errors and incorrect words. Like when they changed ‘rolls.’ Unless they traded a piece of bread with each other, they did not change rolls. They changed ROLES. And no, I am not nitpicking, that is just one glaring example that stood out.”
Even so, how long do we have until a book libraries really want to purchase (or really should?) is available as digital only and is not available to libraries?
To access the full report, click here.