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Notts libraries to charge for e-book loans
29.09.11 | Benedicte Page
Nottinghamshire library service has become the first to institute a charge for e-book loans.
The service, which launched its e-book programme in August, charges £1 per book loan with payment taken via a PayPal account. Head of libraries Peter Gaw said: "It's quite a difficult budget situation and we felt we weren't in a position to provide it for free at a time when we were cutting back on our hard copy book fund. Our provider is Askews, and the way it is set up, a charge clocks up on each loan. If e-books become very popular, we'd then have a bill we hadn't budgeted for."
The move has met with support from Mark Taylor, head of libraries for Windsor and Maidenhead, and chair of the digital working group for the Society of Chief Librarians. He said: "I don't think the Society, or our own public library, would be opposed to that [charging] if we could ensure our customers had access to what they wanted to read electronically."
However, campaigner Desmond Clarke said the £1-per-loan charge was "excessively high". He said: "I frankly don't think it's going to get anywhere. You can download a lot of books for free, or buy them for 99p. It's part of a policy that hasn't been thought through—there seems to be a lack of any common agreement of how to make the system work."
It is 18 months since the Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced that it would not be illegal for libraries to charge for e-books under the current law. At the time Martin Palmer, principal officer for libraries, at Essex, warned it contradicted the ethos of public libraries to charge for books. He said: "It's basically reading and we don't charge for reading. I don't see why e-books should be any different to print books."
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Desmonde is right, you can download a lot of books for free, and some for £1, but not really the kind of books a reader might want to borrow from a library. This is a smart move at a difficult budgetry time for libraries: the kind of initiative 'campaigners' should be suporting not decrying. Is someone with a £100 electronic device going to balk at paying a quid to downlaod and loan a library e-book?
Looking to the future, it seems that although everyone will continue to pay taxes for a skeleton public library service; the majority will see the service they depend upon privatised, turned over to the 'community' for as long as it has the resources to run it, or simply closed. Running parallel to this 'Big Society' wheeze, Library authorities will be running down printed book stock in the few remaining and charge punters for e-book loans. An affordable, accessible service "free at the point of use" will effectively cease to exist. Is this what government wants ? Is it what people want from their government ? It is not.
Mmmmm, this is an interesting move but would seem to go against the principal ethos of providing "access to reading free at point of use"? I would agree with Desmond Clarke here. This only goes to show how current library strategy in the UK is patchy at best, which could quite possibly lead to a two, three-tiered service.
Incidentally, I just searched on Amazon kindle store and there are books by Lee Child and Michael Connelly (hugely popular, when I worked in public libraries) available for 99p. Furthermore, with Amazon announcing their shiny new tablet yesterday, that means the original kindle will come down in price. So charging £1 per book loan seems somewhat excessive, and what about if that person wants to renew? I love public libraries and what they stand for, but the current culture in which they operate, stinks.
You will have noted in the Yorkshire Post this morning that North Yorks has identified eight "category three" libraries, where all public funding is to be removed. They are not alone. That tallies with your concern that there will "possibly" be a two, or three-tiered service. Feel free to delete the word "possibly" from your comment, if you find this information convincing.
Discussing whether 10p or £1 is an appropriate price for the loan of an e-book seems an irrelevance and a diversion, may I respectfully point out to you and Desmond, if in principle no charge should be made for them at all. Incidentally, the disadvantaged person who is fortunate enough still to have access to a community library and enters it to borrow a book -- without being the owner of the latest "shiny new Amazon tablet -- only to find therein a depleted book stock, no trained staff and a charge on every item that is not a physical book, is being illegally and utterly short-changed by those who run the Library Service. Perhaps he is, in their view, a "category three" user ?
Perhaps we are missing the most important effect of the growth of the ebook, 4% last year, 10% this and who knows where in a year or two's time? The production of the physical book is fast approaching a tipping point -certainly for hardback fiction, the mainstay of any library - in that a) the number of physical copies that can be printed is falling so low that it becomes uneconomic to produce them at all and b) the number of retail outlets that might have possibly stocked these books to sell has been terminally undermined by the combination of cut-throat discounting (supported by publishers searching for market share).
In short, if the physical book becomes uneconomic to produce just where does that leave the libraries - government cuts or not?
If a fee is applied to library check-outs, users may be better off just buying the book outright through one of the many markets. The price of ebooks is so reasonable and since many, many classics are free, charging users is perhaps not the wisest way to recoup money.In my area we finance the library system with voted upon levies and a huge amount of volunteerism. The services must be free to a point for people who have no other alternatives for access to reading material. Our libraries offer free computer online access, job training, free lending of books, ebooks, and movies and have no debt.It can be done without charging user fees!
A large number of libraries in North America offer free downloads of both Ebooks and audiobooks. They are supplied by a company called Overdrive and the loans expire and self-destruct after a maximum 3 week loan period. Overdrive has recently signed an agreement with amazon to offer their enormous catalogue through this service. I am greatly surprised that British libraries (or library) are charging for a service so widely available for no charge in North America.
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