By Julie Bosman for Raymond McCrea Jones in The New York Times<\/p>\n
Published: March 14, 2011<\/p>\n
Imagine the perfect library book. Its pages don\u2019t tear. Its spine is unbreakable. It can be checked out from home. And it can never get lost.<\/p>\n
The value of this magically convenient library book \u2014 otherwise known as an e-book \u2014 is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries building their e-book collections have typically done so with the agreement from publishers that once a library buys an e-book, it can lend it out, one reader at a time, an unlimited number of times.<\/p>\n
Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions on its e-books, requiring that books be checked out only 26 times before they expire. Assuming a two-week checkout period, that is long enough for a book to last at least one year.<\/p>\n
What could have been a simple, barely noticed change in policy has galvanized librarians across the country, many of whom called the new rule unfair and vowed to boycott e-books from HarperCollins, the publisher of Doris Lessing, Sarah Palin and Joyce Carol Oates.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople just felt gobsmacked,\u201d said Anne Silvers Lee, the chief of the materials management division of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which has temporarily stopped buying HarperCollins e-books. \u201cWe want e-books in our collections, our customers are telling us they want e-books, so I want to be able to get e-books from all the publishers. I also need to do it in a way that is not going to be exorbitantly expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
But some librarians said the change, however unwelcome, had ignited a public conversation about e-books in libraries that was long overdue. While librarians are pushing for more e-books to satisfy demand from patrons, publishers, with an eye to their bottom lines, are reconsidering how much the access to their e-books should be worth.<\/p>\n