Battle Over Access to Online Books

"When Internet song-sharing services created digital jukeboxes of free music, book publishers raced to bolt the door to their own archives of copyrighted works.

Many librarians, on the other hand, thought the idea was pretty exciting.

Now, new technologies are igniting a similar battle closer to home. Librarians have seized on the potential of digital technology and offered users free online access to the contents of books from their homes, and they are squaring off with publishers who fear that free remote access costs them book sales....

'What we are really excited about is the potential of the technology to allow greater dissemination of information because getting information into the hands of everybody we can is what we are all about,' said Miriam Nisbet, legislative council for the American Library Association. 'What we are concerned about is the dark side, which is trying to lock everything up.'

But locking everything up is exactly the response from the largest publishers. Although hundreds of smaller publishers with fewer popular titles have allowed libraries to 'lend' their books electronically, the major trade publishers are refusing to cooperate.

'Lending over their Web sites — I think that is a problem,' said Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of the books division of AOL Time Warner. 'There is an inherent danger that would worry me — you are opening yourself up to being copied wildly without any control....'

The tensions among libraries and publishers are coming to the fore as several companies that originally aimed to help publishers sell digital books to consumers have instead set their sights on serving libraries, which are the only paying customers. Some of their efforts are ruffling publishers' feathers....

'Libraries very much want to move away from the one book, one user model,' said Marge Gammon, senior director for marketing and publisher relations at netLibrary, 'We get asked a lot, `When is that going to change?' ' " [New York Times: Technology]

If you don't understand why the CBDTPA could be so disastrous for libraries, this article summarizes it in a nutshell, although the NYT doesn't take the publishing world's words to their logical conclusion and spell it out.

Publishers are so terrified of their content being distributed illegally that most of them will do anything in their power to completely lock down access to titles and leave NO LOOPHOLE for libraries. Because if they leave a backdoor that lets libraries lend digital files, then hackers can use it to defeat the encryption.

If you've ever borrowed a book, CD, or video from a library (and I do mean ever), think about the next generation of kids not being able to do that with digital files, which will include ebooks, MP3s, MP4s, and more in the near future. We're well on our way to turning out culture into digital files, so imagine if libraries couldn't catalog, circulate, or preserve that culture.