Let's pretend they're ebooks

In days of yore, back when people were blogging, I described the way that libraries were offering ebooks as being a "Pretend It's Print" model. At the time, I felt that this model was designed to sustain and perpetuate the model that libraries and publishers had been using since prehistoric times, and that it ignored most of the possibilities inherent in the ebook. Ebooks could liberate the book from the shackles of their physical existences!

 
I was right, and I was wrong. The book publishing world seized on digital technology to put even heavier shackles on their books. In turn, technology companies such as Amazon locked down innovation in the ebook world so that libraries could no longer be equal contributors to the enterprise of distributing books, all the while pretending to their patrons that the ebooks they licensed were just like the print books sitting on their shelves.

 
Somehow libraries and publishers have survived. Maybe they've even thrived with the "pretend it's print" model for ebooks. There are plenty of economic problems, but whenever I talk to people about ebooks, the conversation is always some variation of "I love reading ebooks through my library". Most library users are perfectly happy pretending that their digital ebooks are just like the printed books.

 

A decade later, we need to change our perspective. It's time we seriously started pretending that printed books are just like ebooks, not just the other way around. The library world has been doing something called "Controlled Digital Lending" (CDL) , which flips the "pretend it's print" model and pretends that print is just like digital. The basic idea behind controlled digital lending is that owning a print book should allow you to read it any way you want, even if that involves creating a digital substitute for it. A library that owns a print book ought to be able to lend it, as long as it's lent to only one person at time. It's as if books were printed and sold in order to spread ideas and information!

 
Of course radical ideas such as spreading information have to be stopped. And so we have the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit and its assorted fallout. I'm not a lawyer, so I won't say much about the legal validity of the arguments on either side. I'm an ebook technologist, so I will explain to you that whole lawsuit was about whether the other side was sufficiently serious about pretending that print books are just like ebooks and that ebooks are just like print books. Also that the other side doesn't understand how print books are completely different things than ebooks. Those lawyers really take to heart the White Queen's recommendation to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast.

 
The magic of technology is that it can make our pretendings into something real. So let's think a bit about how we can make the pretense of print-ebook equivalency more real, and if the resulting bargain makes any sense.

 
Here are some ways that we could make these ebooks, derived from printed books, more like print books:

1. Speed. It takes me an hour or so to get a print book from a library. Should I be able to get the digital substitute in a minute? Should I be able to read a chapter and the "return" it so that someone else can use it the next seconf? CDL already puts some limits on this, but maybe there could be a standard that makes the digital surrogate more like the real thing?
   
   
2. Geography. Printed books need to be transported to where the reader is. Once digitized they could go anywhere!. Maybe something like a shipping fee could be attached to a loan or other transfer. Maybe part of the fee could accrue to creators? Academic libraries have long done interlibrary loan of journal articles by copying and mailing the article, so why not do something equivalent for books?
   
   

These two attributes matter a lot in defining commercial markets for books and ebooks, and will become increasingly important as distribution technologies scale up and improve. Although publishers today make most of their money on the most popular books, book sales and usage of books in libraries have very long tails. There are millions of books for which global demand could be met by aggressive CDL of just a few copies. The CDL system instituted by Internet Archive also has a countervailing effect - the world-wide availability combined with so-so EPUB quality and usability probably result in stimulation of demand for print copies. This effect is likely to diminish as technologists like me smooth out the DRM speedbumps in CDL and begin to apply machine learning to EPUB generation.

 
It's worth noting that the "long tail" in book publishing also applies to authors and publishers. It's likely that the Internet Archive's CDL service has a larger market effect (whether positive or negative) on these market participants.

 
Here are some ways that we shouldn't make ebooks more like  print books:

1. Search. Ebooks make search much easier than in print books. Maybe search should be disabled in CDL ebooks? Or maybe, we could enable search in print books. Google Books already sort of does this, if you have the right edition, but the process of making an ebook from a print book should give you an easy way to enable search in the print!
   
   
2. Accessibility. Many reading-disabled users rely on ebooks for access to literature, science and culture. Older adults such as myself often find that flowable text with adjustable font size is easier on our eyes. In addition to international treaties that treat accessible text as an exception to copyright, most authors and publishers don't want to be monsters.
   
   
3. Smell. Let's not go there.
   
   
4. Privacy. The intellectual property world seems to think that copyright gives them the right to monitor and data-mine the behavior of readers on digital platforms. In some cases, copyright extremists have required root access to our devices so they can sniff out infringing files or behavior. (While they're at it, they might as well mine some bitcoin!) It is an outrage to think anyone who makes ebooks from print books would wire them with surveillance tools; the strong privacy policies of Internet Archive should be codified for CDL.
   
   
5. Preservation. Publishers do a terrible job of preserving the lion's share of the printed books they publish, and society has always relied on libraries for this essential service. In this digital age, any grand bargain on copyrights has to provide libraries with the rights and incentives needed to do digital preservation of both printed and digital books.
   
   

The bottom line is that if we're going to continue to pretend that intellection property is a real thing, we need to start pretending that printed books are like ebooks, and vice versa. A grand bargain that benefits us all can eventually make these illusions real.

Notes: 

1. Copyability. CDL books, like publisher-created ebooks, rely on device-enforced restrictions on duplication (DRM). Printed books rely on the expense of copying machines and paper to limit reproduction. In both cases, social norms and legal strictures discourage unauthorized reproduction. Building those social norms is what creating a grand bargain is all about.
2.  Simultaneous use. Allowing simultaneous use of library ebooks during the pandemic is what really got the publishers mad at Internet Archive. A lot of people went mad during the lockdown, to be honest, and we're still recovering. 
3.  Comments. I encourage comment on the Fediverse or on Bluesky. I've turned off commenting here.