Unfortunate, But Not Surprising: Court Blocks Maryland’s Library eBook Law

Link: Unfortunate, But Not Surprising: Court Blocks Maryland’s Library eBook Law by Mike Masnick. Published Thu 03 Mar 2022.

Yet more ironies around the nature of books on the internet. When I started working for a library service in 2013 I was – confused? amused? bemused? – by the fact we had to buy ebooks in units. So if we wanted to lend The Warmth of Other Suns ebook to our borrowers, we’d have to buy, say, 20 “copies” of a file. And if we “ran out” of these 20 copies, borrowers would have to go through the charade of placing a “hold” on a copy.

The reason for this is that publishers have always been wary of lending ebooks via libraries – it also explains why you have to use a DRM app in order to get the ebook onto your device once you’ve downloaded it to your PC.

(Sidenote: This is one of several reasons it’s worth looking at a Kobo ereader instead of a Kindle. Because Rakuten, the company that owns Kobo, also owns Libby, the company that most library services use to distribute ebooks, you can download library ebooks directly onto your device, thereby avoiding the whole DRM dance.)

…while they [US publishers] want to insist to you that copying a digital file is “theft,” they will also deny that those same digital files get the kind of first sale rights of physical books.

So publishers get it both ways. By making libraries buy and distribute singular “copies” of ebooks they keep prices high; when a library then argues that the price should therefore be “reasonable” – presumably in relation to the cost of a physical copy – publishers disagree.