The Good Library Blog

I think you're getting confused between the process and the product. The product is the downloadable book and the process is the electronic reader. Libraries didn't lend video players or personal stereos - they lent the videos and the cassettes. Same will happen here as the price comes down and those that want the readers will buy them. However I think libraries need to consider this seriously - what will the role of book lending be when electronic readers become ubquitious? Those of us that love books will still want the `real thing' but could be a minority with all the attendant repurcussions this will have for booklending in libraries.

I meant that public lending libraries exist out of the kindness of publishers. If you open any book you will see a statement that says that 'this book is not to be loaned, copied, 'etc. Yet publishers, over many years, have tolerated and allowed the public library service to ignore this condition of purchase.

Yet, in return in the past two decades, the public library service has allowed its purchasing of books and their central nature within the service to decline to a fraction of what it was. This has been done without discussion with publishers and without their consent. Librarians often talk as if publishers owe them free books and owe them a free right to lend them. Well, if libraries took books and publishing seriously, that might be a fair deal, but they
don't.

Publishers current predictions of the 'general' book market (as opposed to the technical and academic markets- which are huge) are that Ebooks will represent about 5% of the market in ten years. Maybe that figure will be higher and the time will be less, but it is not hard to understand that childrens books and illustrated books are not yet published in electronic form and that if the price of ebook editions of plain text is higher than of printed copies, then even unillustrated books have a fair future.

Even now I could read Dickens in ebook form, if I wanted, but I don't. Nor do my children.

Libraries should help writers win an audience, readers willing to take a chance on a first novel, and they should also make available books from which one might need only a section. Obviously enough. But in so much of the bureaucratic "vision" of libraries, such obvious apsects of the matter are ignored.

I laughted too when I read the assertion that publishers let libraries have books out of the goodness of their hearts.

Public Lending Right (PLR) is the right for authors to receive payment under PLR legislation for the loans of their books by public libraries. To qualify for payment, applicants must apply to register their books with the PLR. Payments are made annually on the basis of loans data collected from a sample of public libraries in the UK.

Over 23,000 writers, illustrators, photographers, translators and editors who have contributed to books lent out by public libraries receive PLR payments each year.

The relationship between libraries and publishers is, I think, more complex than Perkins suggests above. It is hard to see any benevolence in the hikes in academic journal prices over the past 25 years, a process started by the late Robert Maxwell who, when not pillaging his employees' pensions funds, was turning the scholarly journal into a cash cow. Publishers, the vast majority of whom these days are multinational corporations, are in it for the money.
See, for example, the recent behaviour of Elsevier, well-documented by Bad Science:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/elsevier-get-into-fanzines/
I read e-books and dead tree books. I like both. Why do Ihave to choose one or the other? Why can public libraries not offer both?

Tom that's fair and true.. but, as we have seen, librarians are in it for the money, too. I hazard a guess that the average wage in a publishing house is well below the average wage of public librarians. To accuse publishers of being 'in it for the money'...is a bit Pickwickian. And not all publishers are like Robert Maxwell- even though what you suggest he did for Elsevier sound like the right thing to have done.

I believe that the lucky customers should actually be the people who go the libraries and look for books and new novels to read. I never knew that publishers give books for free into the library I always assumed that libraries had to purchase them. Any clarfication on that one

Concerning your comments that you would guess the average salary of public librarians to be above that of people working in publishing, here are some figures I've dug out:
According to the Bookseller annual survey the average salary in publishing in 2008 was £24,871 and that of library workers was £23,000.Of course, this wouldn't be just public librarians. For the same year, the "Annual survey of Hours and Earnings" gave a figure of £20,967 for a librarian's salary. LISU statistics for 2006 had an average salary of £23,000 for library workers. This figure is about right for the librarians in the authority for which I work. So I think your guess is wrong that salaries in publishing are "well below" those in libraries.

Helen

Thank you for this, I am sorry I was slow to post it. I may be wrong completely, I know, but I am not sure these two figures you quote are strictly comparable. I suspect the publisher figure includes all salaries including directors of companies, where the CIPFA figure will only be for staff in the library services.

Whichever turns out to be right, at these levels I think the point is made that it would be a bit harsh as a generality to say that 'publishers are in it for the money' any more than public library staff are. It looks like survival is nearer to the reality.

Robert Maxwell was not the norm, thank goodness.