Amazon.com | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Angry Penguins, Anne Rice Returns, and Other Stuff.

Well, the drama from November, when Penguin pulled all their ebook titles from OverDrive (read: libraries) for dealing with Amazon, and then later decided it was okay for libraries to continue to check out ebooks they had already purchased but not new releases while they negotiated, has concluded for the moment, with Penguin choosing to stop releasing new ebooks to libraries at all and any Kindle versions to libraries at all. Instead of me summing it all up for you, I now present you with further reading: an article from Publishers Weekly that provides a basic summary, and some more information here. A bit of analysis shows that while this is extremely frustrating for librarians and library users, it probably doesn’t do either Penguin or Overdrive much good, since it appears that now the only Big Six publisher making ebooks available to libraries is Random House, even though there is a huge demand for ebooks. So if you’re a small press publisher, willing to make it easy for libraries to work with you, this could be good news for you.

And a few tie ins to Women in Horror Month (kinda):

Anne Rice is back, this time with a werewolf book. Here’s an interview with her, published just a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal.

And this month Madeline L’ Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. You can argue that it’s science fiction or fantasy or both, and you’d be right, but it’s also terrifying. I liked this article that talked about how central women writers have been to the renaissance of science fiction and fantasy, especially for the young adult crowd. The author mentions extremely cool writers like Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Lois Lowry, all of whom came long before J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins ever hit the scene. Although it’s not addressed in the article, if you look at YA horror, I suspect you’ll find a number of women writers there too; Lois Duncan and V.C. Andrews were staples when I was growing up (although not as likely to be assigned reading in school). It’s interesting to note this, as these are frequently perceived as male-dominated genres… does that just happen when we grow up?

And Rose Fox, over at Genreville, notes that there are more starred horror titles (horror-ish, to use her exact wording) this year already than there were all last year. Woohoo!

Not The Apocalypse?

I have to admit that the announcement and grand opening of Amazon’s new Kindle Lending Library made me a little cranky at first. This monopolistic corporation that refused until recently to release any Kindle ebooks to libraries suddenly decides to take over the function of a library, but with a gigantic inventory of titles, and announce it like they invented the model on their own? Grr.

First impressions are just that, though- and a closer look at what Amazon is offering shows that really, it’s not that great. There’s a great analysis of it by Andy Woodworth at Agnostic, Maybe, where he assures us that the Kindle Lending Library is NOT the apocalypse. Whew. You’ll have to forgive me if I seem to be repeating some of what he said, but it seems like we noticed some of the same things.

Here’s the thing. Not everyone has a Kindle or can afford one, or even wants to read ebooks. The big six publishers aren’t happy about it- some of them don’t even sell ebooks to libraries. And the Kindle Lending Library is not available to just anyone. You have to be a Prime customer- meaning you shell out $79 a year to borrow one book a month. That’s more than I pay for my PLAC card(that’s a public access library card), which allows me to check many, many books (including ebooks) out of any library in the state. They might not be Kindle books, but at the rate I read, they’re in and out of the house pretty quickly (well, unless I lose them).

At a time when people are claiming it’s too costly to fund libraries with their tax dollars (and many libraries in this state are in danger of closing their doors) how many of them are going to happily shell out the money for an ereader and a Prime membership for the privilege of “checking out” one relatively obscure book a month? If you already have those two things, and the program expands a little, I guess it could be a nice perk, but I don’t see Amazon driving libraries out of business with this. As alarming as it seems at first, the Kindle Lending Library is not the end of the world as we know it. Yet.

Stay tuned.