The war on book borrowing

Well, that didn't last long.

Only a week after Macmillan called off their ebook license embargo, tradpub opened a new front in the war on book borrowing: the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive, which hosts public domain books and loans licensed ebooks like a library, suspended borrowing limits during the coronavirus epidemic. This brought the ire of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, whose dues-paying members lose royalties but gain new readers from every book they don't sell.

They justify their actions better than I can:

On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.

This is a tremendous and historic outage. According to IMLS FY17 Public Libraries survey (the last fiscal year for which data is publicly available), in FY17 there were more than 716 million physical books in US public libraries.  Using the same data, which shows a 2-3% decline in collection holdings per year, we can estimate that public libraries have approximately 650 million books on their shelves in 2020. Right now, today, there are 650 million books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access that are sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them. And that’s just in public libraries.

And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection. As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive. Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.

One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library. The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time. That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.

Interestingly, you could flip the argument back on these writers. Libraries bought their overpriced hardcovers, which are sitting on shelves not being read due to bans on public gatherings. Libraries aren't asking for refunds, so why are they quibbling over ebook licenses?

I hope they keep this up because libraries represent a huge growth market for indie authors. By all means, Chuck Wendig et al., if you think libraries are violating licensing agreements by suspending borrowing limits for 3 months, take back your licenses and make your embargo universal and permanent.

From the @AuthorsGuild statement on the Internet Archive's most recent move. "Publishers, authors, bookstore owners, and readers have been coming together in magnificent ways these last few weeks to support this fragile industry, so much of which relies on razor-thin margins."

— Alexander Chee (@alexanderchee) March 27, 2020

Know who doesn't live on razor-thin margins? Independent authors and small presses. That's because ebook supply chain costs are basically zero, which puts traditional publishing with its leviathan infrastructure at a big disadvantage. You commonly see Big 5 books sell on Kindle for $10. The price point for indie authors is $5 and often less.

Both my books are available for a buck apiece. For hard sci-fi fans, Tendrils to the Moon tells the story of the first commercial expedition to colonize the Moon. Seeds of Calamity, my second book, is an action-adventure story set in space, featuring zero-gee acrobatics, evil corporations, and alien parasites.

As always, leave a comment below. I'll respond to you as soon as I can.