The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[John F]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Both of those are the USA.

A small percentage of the world's population.

Not true in many countries.


Some countries they can only buy library licensed edition / price and must pay a per loan royalties, that ultimately goes to author or author's estate if in copyright. Also only central purchasing.

I wonder what those "small" and "not many" compare to actual loans.

Looking at this:

https://wordsrated.com/global-book-sales-statistics/

U.S. and China have 45% of book sales distribution, and it looks like China is similar to the U.S. in how it acquires books?

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Renate

So, ballpark number, what's a single read cost a library?

It depends. Terms vary by publisher, author, conditions on the license etc. You can see some examples in the link below, about $60 for a 2 year license. The books expire after 2 years even if nobody read them too, something that's not a problem with paper books.

https://trl.org/blogs/post/the-real-...al-audiobooks/

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Renate

So, ballpark number, what's a single read cost a library?

For a single ebook, the average library price the last time I was looking into it was about 3 to 4 times the retail price with some costing even more. This is for an ebook licensed for 24 months or 52 checkouts whichever comes sooner. As an example, the price charged my local library for J. D. Robb's Passions in Death. This is published by the St. Martin's Publishing Group an imprint of Macmillan. The library paid $71 Cdn for a 24 month/52 checkouts license so a cost of ~$1.37 Cdn per checkout. Since this was expected to be popular, the library purchased 3 copies and currently has an ~6 week wait time.

You can find quite a bit of information around the Internet. One example being:
The Real Costs of Digital Content: eBook and Digital Audiobooks.

A bit humourous in that @salamanderjuice and I both picked the same article.

[Aleron Ives]

I wonder what libraries could possibly do to increase their bargaining power in such an unfair situation. Short of legislation forcing publishers to stop price gouging, it doesn't seem fixable.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by DNSB

This is for an ebook licensed for 24 months or 52 checkouts whichever comes sooner.

Since I put The Waiting (new Michael Connelly) on hold at the Los Angeles Public Library, they have completely burned through 20 copies. I was 1800+ on the list when I started, and now am around 700 for the remaining 220 copies, with another 700 people behind me.

I suspect that there might be some sort of "bulk discount" available to really large libraries.

Also, LAPL is great in that a book with zero copies can be gotten just by putting it on hold. It has never taken them more than 2 weeks to buy another copy of the books I do this for.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

I wonder what libraries could possibly do to increase their bargaining power in such an unfair situation. Short of legislation forcing publishers to stop price gouging, it doesn't seem fixable.

A simple thing would be to change the license to just remove the time limit altogether and make the license good for a set number of loans, period.

If a less popular book hasn't had fifty checkouts in two years, why make it expire?

[Quoth]

The Expiry is stupid. You have the scenario of earlier books of a series being unavailable as ebooks in the library, but still there on paper.

Libraries should get ebooks free and pay a per loan royalty. Any number of loans in parallel and for ever.

As an aside copyright should be 40 years after Author's death, or maybe less. The repeated increasing is crazy. It's corporate greed & control, not about authors or their children.

Also no geographic limits and no out of print. The publishing industry is broken.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Quoth

As an aside copyright should be 40 years after Author's death, or maybe less. The repeated increasing is crazy. It's corporate greed & control, not about authors or their children.

The Disney rodent is to blame.

[Sirtel]

IMO copyright should end with the author's death, unless the author has underage kids. The grown kids can support themselves, like most other people's kids.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

IMO copyright should end with the author's death, unless the author has underage kids. The grown kids can support themselves, like most other people's kids.

I'm all for life + 20.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Renate

The Disney rodent is to blame.

There's a joke about copyright terms being life + the number of years since Walt Disney's death.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Renate

The Disney rodent is to blame.

'tis true and unlikely to change any time soon.

But hey, even Steamboat Willie eventually reached public domain. Many were curious to see if Disney would push to extend it even farther.