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The Society of Chief Librarians (SCL) is to have meetings with individual publishers over e-lending, with licensing business models among proposals for discussion. Leasing e-books for a set time period, or a limited number of loans—the proposal favoured by HarperCollins a year ago, and at the time widely criticised—are among the options being put forward.
Mark Taylor, head of libraries at Windsor and Maidenhead and chair of the SCL digital group, said that licensing arrangements were "akin to how we deal with electronic reference", although he added that there was "a justifiable argument that the number of loans HarperCollins was proposing [26 per purchase] was set too low". Taylor also said that in the absence of Public Lending Right payments for e-books, a proposal for alternative remuneration for authors was "in the mix".
Options accepted by publishers will then be discussed with aggregators. "The ideal would be one arrangement suitable to all, but we may end up with different arrangements for each publisher," Taylor said.
Meanwhile, doubts are being voiced on both sides of the Atlantic about whether libraries should be engaging with e-lending at all. A widely discussed post by US blogger Bobbi Newman at librarianbyday.net suggested librarians should stop buying e-books until issues over provision settled down. Newman described the issue as "a hot mess that is consuming our time, our resources and our money".
Nicola Solomon, general secretary of the Society of Authors, questioned whether e-lending was a core service for libraries. "My personal view is that libraries are important as community spaces, and [that they] are maybe undermining their own value if they are e-book lending instead of physical lending," she said. "People who are time-rich and money-poor should be able to find a good, rich offering, and it seems to me that's a priority over remote e-book lending to people who can afford e-readers."
But Helen Leech, virtual content manager for Surrey Libraries, responded: "We are not just here to serve the needs of the poor, we are a reading service and we have to follow where our customers are going. We think one in 10 people in Surrey have an e-reader, and we're pretty sure seven in 10 have mobile devices they can use to read books. We will shortly be starting to loan Koboes as a pilot scheme because we have closed our mobile library service."
Taylor said the issue was "not a case of either/or", saying: "E-reading is a means of engagement with reading that some wouldn't otherwise consider."