HarperCollins | Musings of the Monster Librarian

You can add Penguin to the list of “Big Six” publishers refusing to sell digital copies of their books to libraries.

Penguin announced on Monday that it will no longer sell digital books for new titles, and has disabled the ability to download ebooks in Kindle format in ALL of its titles. This is so frustrating to me! One of my big gripes with the Kindle was always that it used a proprietary format and that Amazon wouldn’t allow Kindle books to be lent in libraries. As of September 21, that changed, and it was HUGE for both libraries and library users who owned Kindles. Circulation statistics for ebooks went way up, and libraries spent a big chunk of money buying Kindle books. Now that Penguin has disabled Kindle functionality, I hope it also plans to refund some money and offer an apology for leaving libraries to deal with huge numbers of irate library patrons. Further, now Random House is “actively reviewing” its policy- although it’s hard to know what that actually means.

So here’s where we are with the “Big Six” publishers. Macmillan and Simon and Schuster refuse to sell ebooks to libraries at all. Hachette, and now Penguin, decline to sell frontlist titles in digital format, Penguin has disabled Kindle functionality, and HarperCollins requires libraries to re-license an ebook after 26 circulations (although that’s apparently under discussion). Who exactly are the winners in this situation?

Frankly, this stinks for pretty much everyone. Surely, publishers, authors, libraries, and readers can come up with something workable? Even if there are compromises that need to be made, it would be nice to find a way to make things come out with the sunny side up.

Why boycott HarperCollins?

Well, I’m late to the party with this news, but better late then never. HarperCollins has instituted a new policy of selling ebooks to libraries. After 26 checkouts, an ebook license will expire and a new license for the same book will have to be purchased. HarperCollins apparently came up with the number 26 because that would be equal to a year’s worth of two-week checkouts. Maybe in some places, books get used up and thrown out after 26 uses, but in my personal experience, unless it’s seriously damaged or out of date, I put it back together the best you can and put it back out on the shelf. The school library I worked in had a great budget for a school its size, but I could have been paying for two licenses or even three for the most popular titles, at the rate that kids checked in and out. That would have left a lot of holes in the offerings I could make, both in fiction and in nonfiction. So… there are a lot of librarians, readers, and even authors, who are vocally unhappy about this. Some are going so far as to boycott HarperCollins. This is actually quite a job, since HarperCollins owns many, many imprints.

Now, I get that publishers are in it to make money, and they see library checkouts as lost sales. With individual purchases of ebooks, you basically have one reader=one book. It’s simple to see the impact on sales. But libraries are a different matter. Libraries lend. There, you have many readers who can read the same book (which they are reading instead of buying) so publishers see those as lost sales (even though the library user might go out and buy the book afterwards if she likes it enough to want to read it 26 times).

The result of the idea that libraries get in the way of sales means that it is really difficult to get ebooks from the library. If you have a Kindle, you’re out of luck- Kindle books can’t be lent by libraries. If there’s an author you like who’s published by Macmillan- well, they don’t sell ebooks to the library market at all. It is, however, an incredibly wrongheaded idea. Libraries create and enable readers, and those are the people who are using Kindles, Nooks, and the other various ereaders out there. Nonreaders don’t use ereaders, It’s time for publishers to wake up and see that libraries are the ones creating their customers.

Libraries already face stringent budget cuts. Many are struggling for survival. This isn’t a library-friendly policy. But I question whether it’s really a good idea to boycott HarperCollins. Their imprints serve some pretty big groups of readers- romance readers, children’s books- and for a library to boycott HarperCollins (and some are even pulling print titles as well) denies something that every librarian knows is vitally important- and that’s accessibility to their community. It makes me really angry that HarperCollins is pulling this, limiting access to ebook titles , and obviously changes have to be made in the relationships major ebook publishers have with libraries (here’s a very intelligent post at EarlyWord, “Towards a New Model of Ebook Circ in Libraries”). But a library boycott is not the answer. However, you personally can make a difference by boycotting HarperCollins ebooks and by writing the CEO at HarperCollins on the behalf of libraries and ebook users (maybe you are one) with the aim of doing what we try to do here at MonsterLibrarian, which is to connect people with books, in whatever form they take.