Librarian Unhappiness Over New Harper E-Book Lending Policy Grows

(Source: Calvin Reid @ Publishers Weekly)

The sometimes uneasy relationship between librarians and book publishers reached a new level of tension after HarperCollins—citing the explosive growth of e-book sales—announced a new e-book lending policy beginning March 7 that will limit the length of its library licenses to a maximum of 26 loans per e-title. The revised policy has outraged librarians, who say the new policy will strain budgets and is shortsighted, ignoring the role of libraries in encouraging literacy and building an e-book market for publishers. The issue has become so emotional that some librarians have organized a boycott of HarperCollins new books over the issue.

Librarians found out about the policy through a letter last week from Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive, the library e-book wholesaler, announcing that going forward HarperCollins will limit the length of library e-book licenses to 26 checkouts, or roughly a year. Once the 26 checkouts have been reached, libraries must purchase a new license. In the past, library licenses have been unlimited, but in his letter to librarians, Potash said that, “several trade publishers are re-evaluating eBook licensing terms for library lending services. Publishers are expressing concern and debating their digital future where a single eBook license to a library may never expire, never wear out, and never need replacement.”

Indeed as the popularity of e-books have grown, publishers have grown even more leery of the role of libraries in lending e-books, fearful that the availability of digital books from a library will make it far too easy to avoid buying them from a retailer. Typically libraries buy licenses to titles that allow e-books to be checked out one at a time like a physical book—another concession to publishers that irritates many librarians—a practice that denies the obvious ability of digital content to be loaned to an unlimited number of library patrons. Patrons also don’t “return” library e-books, because they are designed to expire and cease to work at the end of their loan periods.


Potash’s Letter to Librarians

Potash’s letter also went on to outline other publisher concerns, requiring that OverDrive and its library clients honor, “geographic and territorial rights for digital book lending, as well as to review and audit policies regarding an eBook borrower’s relationship to the library (i.e. customer lives, works, attends school in service area, etc.),” in other words, OverDrive and the libraries must make sure that patrons borrowing e-books have library cards and are resident in that library’s district.

Librarians are easily one of the most wired and web savvy of the book-related professions, and their reactions on library blogs, websites, Twitter and elsewhere were swift, heated and direct, denouncing the new policy and calling for a response from librarians. Indeed some librarians have been critical of Potash and OverDrive, claiming the vendor did not offer sufficient resistance to the new policy. Potash addressed these concerns, noting that OverDrive is required to carry out the policies of each publishers’ license. But he has also removed HarperCollins’ e-book catalog from OverDrive’s Library Marketplace, a librarian-only site OverDrive uses to market e-books to librarians, until the situation and the new policy is clearly understood by all libraries.

 

HarperCollins’ Responds to Library Concerns

Yesterday Josh Marwell, HarperCollins president of sales, released an open letter to librarians detailing HarperCollins’reasons for the change of policy. Marwell wrote that HarperCollins’ library e-book policies were 10 years old and date from “a time when the number of e-readers was too small to measure.”

 

He pointed out that it has been projected that nearly 40 million e-reading devices will be purchased by consumers in the coming year and said, “We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.”

 

Marwell said the new policy was reached after consulting with agents, distributors and librarians and the 26 checkouts would offer about a “year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist.” Once a license reaches 26 checkouts, a new license will have to be purchased but at a lower price pegged to the paperback price.

 

So far, librarians remain dissatisfied with the HarperCollins response and two librarians, Brett Bonfield and Gabriel Farrell, have organized a Boycott HarperCollins website that offers a place for librarians to vent their frustration, organize a response, discuss the actual viability of a boycott or find other ways to address the situation. A spokesperson for HarperCollins said the publisher has “no comment” on the boycott.

 

OverDrive in the Middle

 

In a phone interview with Potash, he said he removed the HarperCollins e-book catalog from OverDrive’s Library Marketplace because many librarians still did not understand that Harper’s licensing policy was changing. “We don’t want to make these titles available at the new terms until all librarians understand the changes.” Potash was clearly uncomfortable over the notion of boycotting HarperCollins, emphasizing that many librarians, “don’t realize that HarperCollins was one of the first publishers to offer e-books for lending through libraries.” Indeed, the debate over the new policy has served to highlight the fact that S&S and Macmillan don’t license e-books to libraries at all.

 

Potash said he was “not aware of any other publishers following HarperCollins’ e-book lending policy so far.” While Potash said, “I understand the frustration,” he also said that HarperCollins could have dropped lending e-book entirely and that, “librarians can also decide whether they want to continue building the e-book market for publishers.”

 

“We continue talking to publishers and librarians. We think both sides are not focusing on what it means to buy e-books now, rather than two or three years from now,” Potash said. “But I can’t tell publishers and agents what to do. This is unsettling to OverDrive, we’ve got to engineer and manage these policies and it’s not simple to do.”

Huck Finn and the N Word.

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with "slave" when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the "n" word ("My mother said it's only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people") and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. "My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it."

Including the table of contents, the slur appears 219 times in Finn. What finally convinced Gribben to turn his back on grad school training and academic tradition, in which allegiance to the author's intent is sacrosanct, was his involvement with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Alabama.

Tom Sawyer was selected for 2009's Big Read Alabama, and the NEA tapped NewSouth, in Montgomery, to produce an edition for the project. NewSouth contracted Gribben to write the introduction, which led him to reading and speaking engagements at libraries across the state. Each reading brought groups of 80 to 100 people "eager to read, eager to talk," but "a different kind of audience than a professor usually encounters; what we always called ‘the general reader.'

"After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable." Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and "general readers" that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. "For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs," he said.

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition's potential for controversy. "I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified," he said. "Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this." Indeed, Twain scholar Thomas Wortham, at UCLA, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler (who published expurgated versions of Shakespeare for family reading), telling PW that "a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn't challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?' "

Of course, others have been much more enthusiastic—including the cofounders of NewSouth, publisher Suzanne La Rosa and editor-in-chief Randall Williams. In addition to the mutual success of their Tom Sawyer collaboration, Gribben thought NewSouth's reputation for publishing challenging books on Southern culture made them the ideal—perhaps the only—house he could approach with his radical idea.

"What he suggested," said La Rosa, "was that there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial. We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful."

La Rosa and Williams committed to a short turnaround, looking to get the finished product on shelves by February. Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition will be a $24.95 hardcover, with a 7,500 first printing. In the meantime, Gribben has gone back to the original holographs to craft his edition, which is also unusual in combining the two "boy books," as he calls them, into a single volume. But the heart of the matter is opening up the novels to a much broader, younger, and less experienced reading audience: "Dr. Gribben recognizes that he's putting his reputation at stake as a Twain scholar," said La Rosa. "But he's so compassionate, and so believes in the value of teaching Twain, that he's committed to this major departure. I almost don't want to acknowledge this, but it feels like he's saving the books. His willingness to take this chance—I was very touched."
 
Question for my readers: Is it appropriate to edit Twain's work in this manner? Is it ever appropriate? If so, when?

New Survey on E-Book Trends

Source: Publisher's Weekly

A survey of 600 publishers from across the industry spectrum found 64% now offering e-books with 74% of trade houses producing titles in that format. The trade and STM segments had the biggest gain in number of publishers producing e-books in the survey, the second one conducted by the conversion and technology services company Aptara. There was no dominant factor among the publishers that don’t produce e-books about why they haven’t entered the market, with 71% giving no particular reason for staying out of the business.

 

The profitability of e-books has been a point of contention between publishers and authors, and according to the survey 66% of trade houses have no clear picture if the return-on-investment from e-books is better or worse than for print books; 15% said the ROI was better, but 13% said it was worse. Aptara attributed the murky picture to publishers “retrofitting existing print workflows” to produce e-books, an inefficient process that inhibits publishers from producing cost savings. The report predicts that as more efficient and scalable digital workflows are implemented, and more backlist titles move to digital, ROI will improve. The two most important reasons trade houses move backlist books into e-books are a desire to extend the life of a title and market demand.

 

Publishers are still selling e-books from their own sites (38%), but Amazon is now a close second (37%), while the report found the iTunes store to be the fastest-growing distribution channel with 22% of publishers now offering e-books there compared to 9% last year. (The report did not ask respondents specifically if they sell through Apple’s iBookstore).

 

The top challenge in producing e-books—for all types of publishers—was content format and compatibility issues. Forty-five percent of all publishers said that was their biggest issue, up from 21% in the summer 2009 survey, a development attributed mainly to the plethora of new e-reading devices introduced into the market in the last year that adds to costs and confusion.

 

Despite some problems, 49% of all publishers said e-books are of “high importance” to their growth plans, with 55% of trade house putting e-books in that category.

Publishing: Where the Boys Are Not

"It’s no secret that lots of women work in publishing. But just how many more women work in publishing than men? In PW’s recent Salary Survey (Aug. 2) one statistic stuck out: 85% of publishing employees with less than three years of experience are women. So, while everyone knows there are more women than men working in this field, that statistic raises the question: is an almost all-female publishing industry bad for business? Does it matter?"

Click HERE for the full article on Publishers Weekly.

So, what does everyone think? I'm still not quite sure where I sit with this.

The News (As I See It)

As expected, Mockingjay (the conclusion to Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy) did exceedingly well in terms of sales. More specifically, Mockingjay sold more than 450,000 copies in its first week, meaning it sold over 200,000 more copies than the third Twilight book did in the same timeframe. Still think publishing is dead?

In the e-reader wars, the Kindle 3 continues to earn glowing reviews and is being hailed as the "best e-ink reader". But Sony isn't out of the game just yet; they're bringing out redesigned digital readers with brand new capabilities. My prediction? The pricetag is still too high, and Sony will never achieve a market readership like Amazon. Even as a fan of Sony, I must say, Sony, you will not win this war. When this newest ploy fails to topple the Kindle, duck out of the game and save your money. Or better yet, reinvest it into the PS4. Make me happy?

On other fronts, who doesn't enjoy a good list about the world of agenting? Well here's a collection of 5 Myths You Shouldn't Believe About Agents. Missing from the list is their ability to sustain themselves with small animal sacrifices and the bucket of tears shed by aspiring authors that they keep underneath their desk to quench their thirst. Perhaps we'll see a part two to this story? ;)

For a laugh, head on over to Stir Your Tea for the 100 step process of writing a "fiction novel". How many blunders did you make in your early days? I certainly recognize a few.

But I think my favourite read of the day is over at Writer's Digest -- 8 Basic Writing Blunders. The title pretty much sums up the content. You owe it to yourself to check this list, if only to exonerate yourself of these literary crimes.

Question for my readers: I'm debating making these news updates a recurring topic for my blog. Would you like to see more posts like this? Let me know!

Also, have anything to say about the news you've just read? Leave it in the comments below!

Toodles!