If There Were No Libraries, Could We Make Them?
A recent post on the Freakonomics Blog on whether someone could start a library system from scratch today[1] has me thinking. Stephen J. Dubner argues that if such an attempt were started today, there would be a huge pushback from book publishers to prevent these new-fangled libraries from freely distributing books. After all, one copy of a book being read by twenty people means that the publishing companies are missing out on twenty potential sources of revenue.
Dubner guesses that “Perhaps they’d come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it’s in circulation. I’m sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements,” but I don’t think this would go far enough for the publishers. They’d try to milk money out of the library, and the reader, and possibly the reader’s mother if they could. It would be more like joining a video store: you pay per title, and a portion of that payment goes towards the store, and another goes back to the movie studios. The store pays the studio for a copy of the movie, and so the studio gets double profits. In a library system, the publishers get the money per copy of the book, and then that’s it.
It wouldn’t stop there, either. With concerns over intellectual property, there would probably be some attempt to ensure some form of ARM on the books: paper that could be read but not photocopied, books that are encrypted requiring a code to read, or some other absurd technology to prevent redistribution and unauthorized reading. Perhaps, at the utmost extreme, libraries would sell you an e-book reader, and distribute books digitally, with enough DRM to choke a horse. If these things seem somewhat far-fetched, the music industry has pulled the same crap on music sales for years.
As someone with aspirations of writing professionally, who wants people to read his work, and believes in open distribution of information, the idea of rights-managed, pay-to-read libraries scares the hell out of me. Fortunately, we have free libraries, which allow people to read for free, without worrying about paying for anything, except late fees, and open access to the written word. It has also provided us with some absolutely beautiful library smut. These pictures are simply beautiful.
- At the time of this post, the site is suffering heavily under the Digg effect, so it might not load. ↩
