First of all, is Amazon somehow secretly to blame for this move? After all, if someone gets frustrated waiting for a library copy and decides to buy the ebook, they’ll buy it from Amazon at least three times out of four. But an in-depth piece that came out on WGBH the other day is particularly interesting.Īpart from summarizing the matter (including talking to Publishers Weekly contributor and Battle of $9.99 author Andrew Albanese), the article raises a couple of interesting points. I’ve seen plenty of articles over the last few months detailing how hard this is on libraries, such as these from the Wisconsin State Journal, Smithsonian, Los Angeles Times, Marketplace, and my own local Indianapolis Business Journal. But dividing that price into the allowed number of checkouts shows that the revenue from someone reading a library ebook is only a fraction of what the publisher would get if that person bought it instead. It’s exactly the same reason publishers and writers worry about piracy: how many of those “free reads” represent lost sales? How many people decided to read for free from the library rather than buy their own copy? Of course, library ebooks don’t represent a complete loss of revenue-libraries do pay a premium price for ebooks, and those ebooks can only be borrowed a certain number of times before they must be bought again. And Macmillan has a history of reacting first to scary things-it was the first to impose agency pricing, after all. He doesn’t go into any detail on how that figure is arrived at, but whether it’s really 45% or not, I don’t doubt that the number of library ebook reads is pretty darned big-and that makes it look scary. It’s easy to sympathize with Sargent’s overall concerns, when he cites the statistic that 45% of Macmillan ebooks read every year are read for free in libraries. Gosh, that was nice of him!) Print sales would be unaffected. (On the bright side, that single book would be made available at half of the usual price for library ebooks or audiobooks, since librarians had been asking for lower prices. Concerned that library ebook lending was harming commercial ebook sales, he announced that, going forward, each library system would be able to purchase one single copy of any new-release Macmillan ebook and audiobook for the first eight weeks of its publication, to be split among users of all its branches. In July of last year, John Sargent of Macmillan dropped a bombshell on libraries with this memo to authors, illustrators, and agents. Given that it’s coming up on six months with no change, it doesn’t seem likely there’s an end in sight. For the last few months, I’ve been watching the story unfold of publisher Macmillan’s decision to start windowing new-release ebook sales to libraries.
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