Are you an artist? Time to pack up and move to California. There, you can take advantage of their droit de suite law.

Vous ne parlez pas français? It’s worth money, maybe a lot of it, to bone up. The closest we can translate is The Law of Followup, and here’s what it means: if the buyer of your picture or sculpture resells it for a profit, you are entitled to 5% of the resale price.

It’s a law in France and will probably be adopted by all the nations in the European Common Union. Except for California no US state has such a law, and of  course its not on the US statute books.  But some big-name artists  like Chuck Close hope to change that, starting with lawsuits against auction baronies Sotheby’s and Christie’s as well as eBay, the Internet auction website. The class action plaintiffs claim they’ve been stiffed.

“The suits do not specify damages, nor do they list particular sales of art by California residents,” reports the New York Times‘s Patricia Cohen. “Rather, as Eric George, the lawyer who filed them, explained, the complaints seek to force the auction houses to reveal the identities or locations of sellers, information that is often kept secret.”

Cohen says that “Most artists and galleries either don’t know about the law or ignore it.” Too bad: those that do have collected over $300,000 in the 34 years since it was passed.

Would droit de suite work for authors? Since most authors get royalties, it’s hard to see an analogy to resale of artworks – with one exception: library use.  In many foreign countries lending libraries are required to pay a fee or royalty to the author every time a copy is borrowed. It’s called the Public Lending Right, and it’s the law in Canada, the UK, Netherlands, Israel, Scandinavia and other lands. The chances of that happening in the US are slim to none, but it’s nice to know there are some enlightened nations that honor writers and artists.

Artists File Lawsuits, Seeking Royalties

Richard Curtis

Though the friction between book publishers and libraries over the issue of loaned e-books has been simmering for years, it recently burst into bright flame when HarperCollins announced a policy that after 26 loans a library’s lending rights vaporized. (See Harper Redefines Forever).

Harper’s action became a metaphor for the threat of disintermediation that libraries face from the relentless onslaught of digital technology. Though Harper’s rationale for the policy – how can a publisher make a living selling one book for unlimited use? -may make good business sense, the public’s response was visceral and nasty.

Though a petition against Harper might seem to be marginally more effective than spitting into the wind, some 53,000 sympathizers have signed one, reports GalleyCat’s Jason Boog. The full title of the document initiated by a librarian named Andy Woodworth is “Tell HarperCollins: Limited Checkouts on eBooks is Wrong for Libraries.” You can visit the boycott website here and decide if you agree with the petition that “If left in place, this policy would threaten public access to eBooks by making them disappear from the virtual shelf.”

Before you sign that petition, you might try putting yourself in Harper’s place. Reread their open letter to librarians and try coming up with a solution, one that balances the interests of a business and those of the public. Not so easy, is it?

Richard Curtis

“Libraries make no sense in the future,” publishing consultant and futurist Mike Shatzkin recently said. “There is no need for a building.”

The building in which he made this pronouncement happened, unfortunately, to be a library. Obviously he was joking, but given the state of terror in which today’s librarians live, he didn’t exactly leave ‘em rolling in the aisles.

He subsequently felt compelled to amplify in all seriousness in a blog entitled It Will Be Hard to Find a Public Library 15 Years from Now, which I urge everyone connected to libraries – that means everyone, period – to read.

Poor librarians. They seem to be the victims of ham-fisted wisecrackers. I know because I made the same feeble attempt at wit several years ago at the dawn of the digital era. It was in the New York Public Library, and, like Shatzkin, there was a serious message beneath the kidding. Here’s what I wrote about that occasion.

Richard Curtis

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I take pride in my sense of humor, but sometimes it can get rather heavy-handed. That was demonstrated about ten years ago when I was invited to the New York Public Library to give a talk to librarians about the future of books.

The venue was the Map Room, an exquisite gilded salon that epitomized an age that revered the printed book. The attendees, solemn acolytes of the Dewey Decimal System, fit perfectly into the decor. My subject, you will not be surprised to hear, was the digital revolution, and to illustrate it I brought with me some CD-ROM discs. On the podium I had piled a large number of impressively thick tomes. I then produced the discs and declared that all the content of those books and more could fit onto a few of the slim shiny objects I held before them. I declared that a day would come when brick and mortar institutions known as libraries might become irrelevant. Whereupon I gestured broadly at the magnificent building and said, “I’ll bet this joint would make a great condo.”

One hundred librarians volubly sucked in their breath and gaped at me as I had torn a page out of Audobon’s Birds of America and blown my nose in it.

“Just kidding, folks,” I said sheepishly.

Actually, I wasn’t. As print media – newspapers and magazines and books – enter the endangered lists, so do the brick and mortar venues that service them: magazine stores, book shops – and libraries. The contents and catalogues of most libraries are accessible online from practically anywhere in the civilized world. The only reason patrons must go them is to check out and return their physical books. But as libraries acquire e-books, even that function becomes irrelevant. As I recently wrote, E-libraries don’t have a locus. Their patrons have no loyalty to a specific branch; they can traverse cyberspace to locate and download the e-book they wish to “borrow”. Yes, libraries (like bookstores) have managed to remain relevant in the digital age by offering a warm and vibrant social center for scholars, students and book lovers. And many provide computers for patrons to search the Worldwide Web even though they could do as much from their home, office, or a café in Paris.

These ruminations are reinforced in Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen describing the recent legal settlement of the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a publishers group against Google, which since 2002 has been scanning millions of books into its colossal digital archive. Cohen suggest that “digitization of books is ending the distinction between circulating libraries, meant for public readers, and research libraries, meant for scholars.”

Cohen’s article ends on a hopeful note: “The digital-rights class-action agreement has the potential to make physical libraries newly relevant. Each public library will have one computer with complete access to Google Book Search, a service that normally would come as part of a paid subscription.” He cites an NYU professor, Thomas Augst, as asserting that Google is “creating a new reason to go to public libraries, which I think is fantastic. Public libraries have a communal function, a symbolic function that can only happen if people are there.”

Okay, you can hold up on the wrecking ball for now. But I have dibs on that 44th floor penthouse on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

RC

Open Letter to Librarians

Over the last few days we at HarperCollins have been listening to the discussion about changes to our e-book policy. HarperCollins is committed to libraries and recognizes that they are a crucial part of our local communities. We count on librarians reading our books and spreading the word about our authors’ good works. Our goal is to continue to sell e-books to libraries, while balancing the challenges and opportunities that the growth of e-books presents to all who are actively engaged in buying, selling, lending, promoting, writing and publishing books.

We are striving to find the best model for all parties. Guiding our decisions is our goal to make sure that all of our sales channels, in both print and digital formats, remain viable, not just today but in the future. Ensuring broad distribution through booksellers and libraries provides the greatest choice for readers and the greatest opportunity for authors’ books to be discovered.

Our prior e-book policy for libraries dates back almost 10 years to a time when the number of e-readers was too small to measure. It is projected that the installed base of e-reading devices domestically will reach nearly 40 million this year. 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. We are looking to balance the mission and needs of libraries and their patrons with those of authors and booksellers, so that the library channel can thrive alongside the growing e-book retail channel.

We spent many months examining the issues before making this change. We talked to agents and distributors, had discussions with librarians, and participated in the Library Journal e-book Summit and other conferences. Twenty-six circulations can provide a year of availability for titles with the highest demand, and much longer for other titles and core backlist. If a library decides to repurchase an e-book later in the book’s life, the price will be significantly lower as it will be pegged to a paperback price point. Our hope is to make the cost per circulation for e-books less than that of the corresponding physical book. In fact, the digital list price is generally 20% lower than the print version, and sold to distributors at a discount.

We invite libraries and library distributors to partner with us as we move forward with these new policies. We look forward to ongoing discussions about changes in this space and will continue to look to collaborate on mutually beneficial opportunities.

In theory lending e-books should be as simple as lending paper ones.  In actuality the process is bewildering and daunting, particularly in the retail e-book space. Though the savvy technicians of Barnes & Noble/Nook and now Amazon/Kindle are on the way to solving many problems, they have a long way to go. At least that is the conclusion to be drawn from the first part of a two-part article by Erik Christopher in Publishing Perspectives, Friends, Romans, Librarians: Lend Me Your E-book (Part 1).

It might help for you to refresh your understanding about how e-book lending works. Here’s the nutshell version drawn from an article we posted a while back about library lending. “Your library buys an e-book from a publisher. It is then offered for loan to the library’s patrons, and there is a waiting list. When your turn comes up you download the e-book and have it exclusively for a limited period of time. When that time expires the e-book disappears from the patron’s computer and is offered to the next person on the waiting list. If a book is popular, a library or library system may buy more than one e-book version enabling the library to offer it to multiple borrowers.” (See What’s the Difference between Borrowing E-Books and Borrowing Print Books?)  For a device-by-device instructional on downloading library books from the New York Public Library, read Get the Most Out of Your Gadgets with NYPL.

In response to strong customer demand, Barnes & Noble and Amazon have tried to replicate the library experience but fallen short.  Unlike that model, developed and refined by Steve Potash, founder of OverDrive, the leading supplier of e-books to libraries, commercial e-book retailers do not make the borrowing experience remotely as easy as the buying experience.

One university librarian complained that “The problem with many of the lending models is that they are messy. The readers are designed for individuals and not libraries. This in turn forces librarians to often use back doors and is not efficient. Customer service is another issue. Trying to get a hold of someone from Amazon to assist us took a long time. They don’t have a good point of contact to work with libraries and you basically end up bouncing around from one person to another.”

Another said ““Not being able to pay with a corporate account, which we have, is frustrating. We are tax exempt and there is a lot of paperwork and back end work that needs to be done if we pay tax and then need to correct it for our tax exempt status.”

Other frustrations include the restriction by B&N and Amazon to one borrower at a time.  DRM – Digital Rights Management – is yet another issue. Librarians want to be free to acquire books in whatever format they choose, but the restrictiveness of Kindle and Nook DRM makes that impossible. “I’d love it if there were a way to actually ‘lend’ the Kindle books to patrons who wanted to read the books on their own devices,” one librarian wistfully wished.

Christopher’s conclusion? “None of this will be decided by retailers and aggregators simply taking an approach and saying, ‘This is our model, take it or leave it.’ We need to be innovative and understand also that what is an e-book is also changing.”

For one consumer’s less than thrilling adventure in borrowing-land, read Why I didn’t Buy a Kindle.

All this said, help is on the way thanks to a number of e-book lending clubs and websites that take the angst and complexity out of the process and match lenders to borrowers using the terms of the Kindle or Nook.  You can read about some of them here.

Richard Curtis

Stanford University is about to take its physics, engineering and computer science library virtual.  Calling it a “bookless” library, the learning center will pack away its paper and replace it with digital information.

“Stanford is running out of room, restricted by an agreement with Santa Clara County that limits how much it can grow,” writes Lisa M. Krieger in Mercury News.com. “Increasingly, the university seeks to preserve precious square footage. Adding to its pressures is the steady flow of books. Stanford buys 100,000 volumes a year — or 273 every day.”

Other colleges have similar problems, but Stanford is taking the most aggressive measures to solve them.  Replacing the paper library will be a state of the art study center. “It is only half the size of the current Engineering Library,” writes Krieger, “but saves its space for people, not things. It features soft seating, ‘brainstorm islands,’ a digital bulletin board and group event space. There are few shelves and it will feature a self-checkout system. It is developing a completely electronic reference desk, and there will be four Kindle 2 e-readers on site. Its online journal search tool, called xSearch, can scan 28 online databases, a grant directory and more than 12,000 scientific journals.”

Not everyone is tickled pink. The Physics Librarian, not surprisingly, has mixed feelings.  “When I look back, then there is a certain sadness for me. Any change is hard. And there are moments of joy, when I see bookplates of former faculty who owned and donated the book, and sometimes made notes on the side,” said the librarian, Stella Ota. Imagine her emotions as she triages such Nobel Prize winning physicists as Douglas Osheroff, Robert Laughlin and Steven Chu, current director of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Details in Stanford University prepares for ‘bookless library’

Richard Curtis

We’ve projected a near-future in which kiosks located in supermarkets, coffee shops or public libraries will dispense print on demand books. Customers will be able to choose among hundreds of thousands of titles and watch their book being born while they have a cup of coffee or finish their shopping. Some clever Brits, however, have created a lower-tech kiosk – out of a phone booth, turning a village’s double loss – its public phone service and its mobile library – into a wonderful amenity.

The council of a small parish called Westbury-sub-Mendip took one of those familiar red boxes off the phone company’s hands for a token £1. Then the townspeople stocked the booth with books, CDs and DVDs. “Users simply stock it with a book they have read, swapping it for one they have not,” BBC explains. “‘It’s really taken off,’” said one of the town’s councillors. ‘”This facility has turned a piece of street furniture into a community service in constant use.’”

BT Group, Britain’s leading landline telecommunications provider, subsequently received almost 800 applications for parishes to “adopt a kiosk”, and about half of the applications have been fulfilled to date.

Obviously, in an age of cell phones, phone booths worldwide are just occupying real estate. And so are a lot of books, CDs and DVDs. Converting phone boxes to microlibraries solves both problems at a stroke. The only one it creates is long, long queues. C’mon, mate, make yer bloody selection!

Richard Curtis

Short answer? None.

The procedure for borrowing an e-book from your local library is pretty much the same as borrowing a p-book, except you don’t have to travel any further than the distance to your PC. Nor are the economics different. Your library buys an e-book from a publisher. It is then offered for loan to the library’s patrons, and there is a waiting list. When your turn comes up you download the e-book and have it exclusively for a limited period of time. When that time expires the e-book disappears from the patron’s computer and is offered to the next person on the waiting list. If a book is popular, a library or library system may buy more than one e-book version enabling the library to offer it to multiple borrowers.

We’ve detailed the process here because many publishers mistakenly believe that they are being asked to donate e-books to libraries for no compensation, and that the libraries’ rights are in perpetuity. In other words, they fear that they’re giving e-books away for nothing and forever. As a result, the concept of a lending e-library has not yet rung a bell with all publishers. “Simon & Schuster, whose authors include Stephen King and Bob Woodward, has also refrained from distributing its e-books to public libraries, writes New York Times‘s Motoko Rich in Libraries and Readers Wade Into Digital Lending. She quotes an S&S spokesman as saying, “’We have not found a business model that works for us and our authors.’”

It’s important that book publishers understand the economics of the e-book lending process, and the go-to guy for a tutorial is Steve Potash, founder of OverDrive, the leading supplier of e-books to libraries.

Another issue hampering e-book lending is that Kindle and iPhone don’t observe the practice.Rich writes “For now, the expansion will be slowed in part because, with few exceptions, e-books in public libraries cannot be read on Amazon’s Kindle, currently the best-selling electronic reader, or on Apple’s iPhone, which has rapidly become a popular device for reading e-books. Most library editions are compatible with the Sony Reader, computers and a handful of other mobile devices.”

Despite the slow takeoff , e-books are now offered at more than 5000 public libraries, and downloads in 2009 to date exceed 1 million units.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Telegraph.co.uk reports that the “Recession-hit Leicestershire County Council has replaced library staff with self-service machines to cut costs.” Some 19 humans in 16 venues will be replaced by bar-code reading machines.

The move is designed to save thousands of pounds, but one has to wonder about stuff like – well, if there’s a late penalty, does it make change for a ten pound note? Does it also sort returned books and put them back on the shelves? Will it host readings by local literary celebrities? Can it direct you to the loo?

A spokesperson says self-service offers customers “choice of quicker and easier methods of checking out and returning books in the library”. What do the customers say? They’re furious.

Read about it here.

RC

We’re not sure Arnold Schwarzenegger is handing out Terminator medals to schools switching to digital textbooks but if he is, the first one will go to Cushing Academy. The 144 year old New England prep school’s library has gone virtual with a total commitment to e-books, an initiative that California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has been promoting for schools in his home state.

Not only has Cushing purchased a set of Kindles and Sony e-book readers, but it has “given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences,” writes The Boston Globe‘s David Abel. “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ says the headmaster. Obviously not one for half measures, he is purging the library itself and repurposing it. Writes Abel:

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

What to do with the librarian? “Liz Vezina, a librarian at Cushing for 17 years, said she never imagined working as the director of a library without any books.”

Years ago, I appalled an audience of librarians by suggesting that when digitized, the entire contents of the venerated New York Public Library could be stored in a small room, and the building could then be converted into condos. It was a joke (tasteless, admittedly), but I wonder if I gave the speech today whether anyone would even blink.

Read Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books.

(The empty library in the photo is not Cushing Academy’s, incidentally)

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The Boston Globe.