brendan halpin

A lot of people are casting the Internet Archive vs. Hachette suit as some kind of David and Goliath battle, but it’s really a Silicon Valley dickhead moving fast and breaking things vs Goliath battle.

Let’s talk about libraries and ebooks, shall we? The current system is terrible because publishers are (still!) terrified of ebooks. So they’re often prohibitively expensive for libraries, who actually don’t even own them, but, rather, lease them. This sucks.

According to what I’ve seen on the internet, a hard copy of a book can be loaned out an average of 26 times before it wears out and needs to be replaced. So if a book is really popular, libraries are going to need a bunch of copies, and if people are still reading it a year later, they’ll need even more copies. But, absent the current predatory pricing agreements from publishers, one ebook could be loaned out an infinite number of times to an infinite number of patrons without ever needing to be supplemented with additional purchases. You can see why publishers are scared. And authors too! Authors get paid by the copy sold, so if every library could just buy one ebook and lend it forever to everyone at once, this would essentially destroy authors’ ability to get paid for their writing.

So there’s got to be a better solution than bankrupting libraries. Along comes Brewster Kahle, who says, aha! If I own a physical copy, that means I can digitize it and lend out the digital version forever! He did not try to negotiate this. He did not put his considerable clout and money behind lobbying congress to make laws governing how ebooks are sold to libraries. He just, in the long tradition of Silicon Valley dickheads, did the thing and figured he’d be allowed to break the rules.

Well, the courts found that he wasn’t.

Let’s look at an example to see why Brewster’s solution was bad. The Boston Public Library system owns 66 hard copies of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. It also has 22 ebook copies available. There are currently over 500 holds on these 22 copies. So obviously the BPL can’t stock enough ebook copies to keep up with the demand. That’s bad and probably because the publishers are so predatory in how they license and price ebooks. But if the BPL just digitized one of the hard copies they owned and loaned that out, R.F. Kuang gets paid for zero ebooks instead of 22. There are around 9000 public libraries in the USA. If all of them stop paying for ebooks, that represents thousands of dollars in lost income for writers. Which means writing books will be an occupation only for rich people (even more than it already is). Which means less diversity in the kinds of books we get to read.

The current system isn’t fair. Neither was Brewster Kahle’s solution. Maybe he can get to the far less glamorous business of lobbying come up with a solution that works for everyone.