Jan 25, 2012
In Part II of this series, I laid out a plan for public libraries that would provide what I thought was an appropriate eBook lending model. I called it AmPLE, for the American Public Library Enterprise. Something like it has recently come to my attention and I want to describe it.

Library Ideas, Inc., is offering public libraries a product called Freading (meaning, I suppose, “Free Reading”). It matches Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) in its essential feature: multiple patrons of a public library can have the same title checked out at the same time—no waiting lists.

As I suggested for the AmPLE model, Freading works on a pay-per-checkout basis. Libraries are charged $2.00 for checkouts of new books (published any time from today to 6 months ago); $1.00 for older books (7-24 months); and 50 cents for books published more than 24 months ago. Checkout periods are for two weeks, with one renewal allowed. Renewals of the newest books are $1.00 and are free for the older ones.

Freading enables libraries to limit the number of items any patron may have checked out at one time. Libraries allocate virtual weekly “tokens” to their patrons. One token is worth 50 cents, though patrons don’t necessarily know (or need to know) this. A very new book (a $2.00 checkout) requires four tokens. If a library allocates its patrons four tokens a week, then a patron can check out one very new book, two newer books, or four older books each week. This helps libraries control their eBook budgets.

Library Ideas reports current agreements with about 50 publishers (and 20,000 titles), including none of the Big Six, which are still holding out in the fear they may lose a nickel in sales while ignoring the millions they can earn in loans. Their authors know what they are missing, however, and they must be champing at the bit to get in on royalty payments for eBook lending as well as sales.

Library Ideas displays a blind spot in their plans by having no titles from self-published authors in their collection—and no current plans to add them! They are aware of the 90,000 titles, largely from self-published authors, currently being offered by Amazon’s KOLL (an add-on to their Prime service); however, the fact that 295,000 of those titles were checked out by 295,000 separate Prime subscribers in December does not seem to have registered with them. In time, of course, and probably in a short time, the ranks of those self-published authors will be swelled by the addition of “mainstream” authors who will tire of their publishers’ foot dragging on the lending issue. Library Ideas: Take note!

For now, Amazon’s KOLL serves primarily self-published authors and Freading serves small publishers. The day will come, however, and in the not-too-distant future, I predict, when the full-fledged AmPLE vision will be here: Every book, on publication, will be available for lending to all readers on any eReading device, at a reasonable cost and under reasonable terms regarding numbers of simultaneous checkouts. Freading is helping to blaze that trail, and I wish them well.
tags: Books and Libraries

Jan 12, 2012
So the latest blockbuster was published a while back and I immediately went onto my public library web site and, with a few clicks, borrowed it for my iPad. AmPLE (American Public Library Enterprise), the nonprofit company that manages eBook lending for every public library in the country, announced the next day that 2,516,241 others had also borrowed the same book on the first day of its publication. This resulted in gross receipts for the public library loans of that title of $1,258,120.50. AmPLE took 3% for administrative costs and, at midnight on that first day, electronically transferred the other 97% to the publisher’s bank account. (Note that if that blockbuster had happened to be self-published, that entire amount would have gone into the author’s bank account.)

I was only about halfway through the book by the end of my two-week checkout period, so I went back online to my public library web site and, with a few clicks, I bought it for $20.00, the price set by the publisher (or self-published author). AmPLE’s periodic statistical reports revealed that over three million others had also purchased this blockbuster through their public library “store” during those two weeks, for an additional $60 million in income, $58.2 million of which had already been distributed to the publishers or author of this one book.

When I finished the book a few days later, since I now owned it, I loaned it to my wife to read on her Kindle. This also took only a half dozen clicks and minimum input on my public library web site. The book continued to appear on my eBookshelf, though it was no longer available to my iPad, and would not be, until my wife either returned it or the loan period I had specified ran out. When that happened, it “disappeared” from her device and was re-enabled on mine, automatically.

When it was re-enabled, I decided to resell it and I let AmPLE do it. Of course, the sale price was still $20.00 (there is no such thing as a “used” eBook). Once sold, AmPLE took 3%, sent 10% each to the publisher and author (or 20% to the self-published author), and deposited the remaining $15.40 in my account. I could have asked for a check but, instead, I decided to donate the $15.40 to my library’s eBook account, and did so with a few clicks at my library web site. The donation is tax-deductible, and provides my library with an additional 30 eBook checkouts via AmPLE.

Okay, this is my fantasy, but it is not a fantastic notion. This could happen. This should happen. And this can happen—now. The alternative? I don’t even want to think about it.
tags: Books and Libraries

Jan 11, 2012

* NEW * The Global War Against Baby Girls

By Nicholas Eberstadt. The ultimate expression of misogyny, ultimately suicidal. From The New Atlantis, No. 33, Fall 2011. Accessed Jan 12, 2012.

How Would You Like to Be in a Military Prison...Forever?

By Michael R. Hicks. The National Defense Authorization Act (signed by Obama on Dec 31) essentially sets aside constitutional protections for U.S.citizens. Accessed Jan 8, 2012.

Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins

by Matt Taibbi: “It’s the same old ritual, but I just don’t think it’s going to fly the same way this time around.” Let us hope not. From RollingStone Politics, Jan 3, 2012. Accessed Jan 3, 2012.

Dec 31, 2011
An Open Letter to All Living Authors:

I would like to address some of my favorite people today in this, Part VII of The End of Libraries, and give you my take on what is happening in the eBook lending world, a brave new world that is as significant to the history of the printed page as the invention of movable type.

I read 93 books in 2011—78 in their entirety and at least the first 50 pages of 15 others. Midway through the year, while attending a library conference, I won both a Kindle and an iPad 2! What luck, hey?

Knowing that my public library had eBooks to loan, and being a borrower of books rather than a buyer (I can’t afford to buy 93 books a year!), I spent time and effort (too much!) learning the Overdrive interface and checked out my first eBook, When the Killing’s Done, by T.C. Boyle. The experience of reading that book on my iPad made me a dedicated eBook reader. From then on, I didn’t care if I ever held a “real” book in my hands again.

I quickly realized how fortunate I had been to find a Boyle at my library. A subsequent search for something to check out revealed nothing of interest. I maintain a list of books I want to read; it is six pages long at the moment. I checked the first 50 titles on this list in my library’s eBook collection (which it shares with 150 other libraries in my state) and found exactly none of them in the catalog. And most of the titles that were there had long waiting lists.

Desperate for eBook reading matter, and eager to see if the Kindle experience was as great as the iPad, I broke down and bought Desolation, by Yasmina Reza, one of the books on my six-page list. Though for me the iPad reading experience is superior to the Kindle (except in terms of weight), I would still prefer a Kindle edition over hard copy.

There followed a month or two of a dry spell, during which I continued to read books wastefully printed on processed dead trees and badgered my state library consortium to spend more on eBooks.

Eager to convert my wife to eBooks, I finally again broke down and purchased for the iPad the enhanced version of Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean. Its many pages of color photos and ten embedded videos(!) gave me a taste of the delights coming our way as eBooks mature and take on features we cannot even imagine today.

Then came the first rumblings of KOLL—Amazon’s Kindle Owner’s Lending Library—and I began to write this series on The End of Libraries. Once KOLL was announced, and since my company has an Amazon Prime membership, I immediately borrowed my first “free” book from the Lending Library, What It Is Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes. Karl will get a piece of a $500,000 pot from Amazon for that loan, as will all the other authors whose books are loaned during December 2011, KOLL’s first month.

KOLL began with 5,000 titles and by the end of December it had almost 70,000, the vast majority apparently coming from authors in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program, in which authors can self-publish their books. In order to be part of KOLL, KDP authors had to commit to a 90-day participation in the lending program and agree to give Amazon exclusive sales rights during that period to the books enrolled in KOLL. Obviously thousands of you thought it was worth the commitment. Why? I think it is because you have become aware of an exciting new fact of literary life that also occurred to me while watching the eBook world and writing this series over the past six weeks: eBooks are for lending, and anyone who can come up with a scheme to adequately compensate authors for those loans will have built the better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to their door.

Amazon is on its way to doing that, all by itself. Monopolies are inherently undesirable, and this one also threatens the continued existence of a vital national resource: our public library network.

You are going to make a lot more money lending AND selling your books in the future than you make just selling them today. You are going to pressure your publishers to get on board with eBook lending and, if they drag their feet, you will do whatever you need to do to find your way to this enhanced revenue generator. As you do, I ask you to read the first six parts of this series (and any future parts: follow us on Twitter for announcements), consider the ill effects of monopoly and the end of public libraries, and get on board with a movement to bring an adequate eBook lending model to public libraries. I suggest one such model—the American Public Library Enterprise, or AmPLE—in Part II. Public libraries serve all 330 million Americans, not the scant few million who may be Amazon Prime customers and eligible for one KOLL checkout in each calendar month. The revenues you stand to gain which today are sitting on the table are enormous, and our public library network stands ready to bring them to you.

How to proceed? Get together with your fellow writers. Get talking. Don’t fret, the way your publisher is fretting (if you have one). A reading renaissance is at hand, knocking on our doors, ready to bring your works to the masses and masses of money to you. Don’t let this take forever, and don’t let Amazon kill libraries by bringing to a few of us what should belong to the whole world.
tags: Books and Libraries

Dec 15, 2011
On November 2, Amazon introduced the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (KOLL) for its Amazon Prime customers.¹ It initially offered 5,000 titles, most obtained from second-rank publishers under contractual agreements and, under some other fairly hazy arrangement, additional titles one copy of which Amazon apparently agreed to purchase at wholesale for every Prime customer that simultaneously borrowed it.

Then, on December 8, Amazon announced KDP Select, a program to enroll self-published authors in KOLL, and, as I predicted, a week later there were over 52,000 titles available for borrowing in KOLL. I predict that number will again increase tenfold within the next 60-90 days as traditional and first-rank publishers cave in to the enormous pressure from their authors and from the changing nature of the marketplace, and begin listing their titles with Amazon’s KOLL.

Meanwhile, Amazon today claimed it has sold more than a million Kindle devices (including the newest, the Kindle Fire) each week for the past three weeks.² Those devices are primarily intended for one purpose—reading eBooks.

Amazon has been much more reticent about releasing the numbers of its Prime customers, though I can tell you those numbers increased today by at least one—me. And the book I immediately borrowed, What Is It Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes, must have been provided through that fairly hazy arrangement described above. It is most definitely not self-published, and a quick perusal of Amazon’s first five pages of titles from its publisher, the Atlantic Monthly Press, revealed no other titles that were included in KOLL.

Others have estimated Prime customers at around five million, and that was early in 2011, before KOLL was more than a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye.³ If that number was close to accurate almost a year ago, I am probably safe in estimating the number has doubled since then and especially since the introduction of KOLL. Ten million members, all able to check out one book a month, 52,000 books to choose from, and a $500,000 pot to split. I hope after this first trial month Amazon will release some figures relating to KOLL usage; however, whether they do or not, I think things look pretty sunny for many of the authors of those 52,000 books. Not that there isn’t a tremendous amount of controversy around the issue, just now, appropriately enough, among self-published authors.⁴ Much more is to come, particularly as authors associated with traditional publishing houses begin to understand the unprecedented advantage they are missing out on: payment for books that are loaned as well as those that are sold.

What does this mean for public libraries? I think I have made that pretty clear already in the first five parts of this series.⁵ More to come, as more develops.
____________________
¹ The End of Libraries, Part III, from Alltogethernow.org, Nov 6, 2011.
² Customers Purchasing Kindles at Rate of More Than 1 Million Per Week for Third Straight Week, from MarketWatch.com, Dec 15, 2011, accessed Dec 15, 2011.
³ The promise of Amazon Prime, from Daily Artifacts, Feb 24, 2011, accessed Dec 15, 2011.
⁴ How Much Do You Want to Get Paid Tomorrow, by David Gaughran, from Let’s Get Digital: How to Self-Publish and Why You Should. This is one of the best sites to read about the concerns of self-published authors. There are many others. Dec 11, 2011, accessed Dec 15, 2011.
⁵ The End of Libraries, Parts I-VI, from Alltogethernow.org.
tags: Books and Libraries

Dec 08, 2011
Today, Amazon announced the KDP (Kindle Direct Publisher) Select program, which enrolls independent authors and publishers in a $6 million sweepstakes and, upon its announcement, immediately added 129 books to the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. I predict thousands more will follow very soon.

From the press release:¹

The monthly royalty payment for each KDP Select book is based on that book’s share of the total number of borrows of all participating KDP books in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. For example, if total borrows of all participating KDP Select books are 100,000 in December and an author’s book was borrowed 1,500 times, they will earn $7,500 in additional royalties from KDP Select in December. Amazon expects the fund to be at least $6 million for all of 2012, in addition to the $500,000 allocated for December 2011. Enrolled titles will remain available for sale to any customer in the Kindle Store and authors will continue to earn their regular royalties on those sales.

Dec 08, 2011

She's Alive... Beautiful... Finite... Hurting... Worth Dying for

By Vivek Chauhan. Accessed Dec 8, 2011.

The brutal logic of climate change

By David Roberts. Your grandchildren are doomed. From grist, Dec 5, 2011. Accessed Dec 7, 2011.

First Nations taxation

By Anonymous. Okay, it's a blog post about a fairly obscure Canadian issue, but this writer reminded me of the great I.F. Stone. From âpihtawikosisân, Dec 3, 2011. Accessed Dec 5, 2011.

Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?

By Chris Hedges. Well, where were you? From truthdig.com, Dec 5, 2011. Accessed Dec 5, 2011.

Guantanamo for US citizens? Senate bill raises questions.

By Brad Knickerbocker. Repression by legislation, or, Hey, Dude, Where's My Constitution? From The Christian Science Monitor, Dec 3, 2011. Accessed Dec 3, 2011.

Nov 30, 2011

One Nation, Under Arms

By Todd S. Purdum. The release of George Kennan’s personal papers has been a revelation: “What is being done to our country today is surely something from which we will never be able to restore the sort of a country you and I have known.” From Vanity Fair, January 2012. Accessed November 30, 2011.

This Is What Revolution Looks Like

By Chris Hedges. As the parks are cleared by the forces of the corporatocracy, Hedges sees victory on the horizon. From Truthdig.com, Nov 15, 2011. Accessed Nov 15, 2011.

Breathing New Life Into Our Democracy: Part I of III

By Deborah Coyne. From Canadians Without Borders, undated. See also Part II and Part III. Accessed November 12, 2011.

Wall Street Isn’t Winning—It’s Cheating

by Matt Taibbi. From Rolling Stone, October 25, 2011. Accessed November 7, 2011.

Finding Freedom in Handcuffs

by Chris Hedges. From Truthdig.com, November 7, 2011. Accessed November 7, 2011.

tags: Noted with Interest

Nov 13, 2011
We are in a new age now. An age in which the many are subservient to the few. In which the wealth accorded those few outstrip the most magnificent treasuries of medieval monarchies or eastern potentates. In which anxiety, suffering, and want is, increasingly and inexorably, to be the lot of the 99%.

We have 25 million unemployed Americans and no jobs for them, either today or on the horizon. We probably have another 25 million or more working at part-time and/or low-wage jobs which barely—or don’t—allow them to scrape by. We have over 46 million Americans living without an income our government says is necessary to afford the basic necessities of life. And our government’s idea of what those necessities are is cruelly basic, indeed. Can you imagine supporting a spouse and two children on a gross salary of $22,350 a year?

The employment situation is not going to improve because the 1% have figured out how to prosper without the services or consumption of the lion’s share of the 99%. Scarcely anyone is needed to raise our food anymore, now that the “green revolution” and factory farming are well in place. Scarcely anyone is needed to manufacture the goods we consume, now that most manufacturing has been shifted to low-income labor in nations unhindered by environmental, safety, or other annoying considerations. Scarcely anyone is needed to perform a wide spectrum of services, from technology support, medical assistance, and legal research down to flipping burgers and pumping gas, now that the benefits of technology are maturing. Certainly no one is needed to vote any longer, our democratic institutions having been privatized by the corporatocracy.

Webster’s first definition of anarchy is “absence of government.” What we are experiencing is what I would call the New Anarchy, where institutions of public welfare, shared societal goals and responsibilities, and commonly held aspirations and the structures supported to realize those aspirations have been allowed to fade and disappear before our eyes. The “Me Generation” has been succeeded by the “Only Me Generation.”

Without a significant attitude adjustment to halt the runaway and quite literally antisocial train we find ourselves on, a great crash is in all our futures. A dog-eat-dog world can only end in a lonely death for the one dog left standing.

There is a better way, and it has been preached by preachers and sociologists and community organizers and philosophers and politicians since time immemorial. Ben Franklin may have said it best: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

The gibbets are in place, and the bodies are beginning to pile up.
tags: ATN | New Political Party | Politics

Nov 12, 2011
There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the Internet over Amazon’s new Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. A Google search will turn up many more instances than I could hope to footnote here. Be sure to read the reader Comments on the news articles for a full helping of the panic and despair sweeping the world, particularly among writers.

I am not sure they have as much to worry about as they think they do. However, Amazon has been less than forthcoming regarding the details of their financial arrangements with publishers and authors. Let’s look at what we know about those arrangements so far.

In a Wall Street Journal article published the day after the Lending Library was announced,¹ the following was revealed regarding the finances of the deal:

Russell Grandinetti, vice president for Kindle content, said “the vast majority” of participating publishers were receiving a flat fee for their titles, while a more limited group is being paid the wholesale price for each title that is borrowed. “For those publishers, we’re treating each book borrowed as a sale,” he said.

• Essentially any book I want to read is available to me;
• I can read it on any eReading device;
• I can have at least three titles checked out at one time;
• My annual limitation on loans is determined only by how fast I read;
• And the price is kept under $2 per title on average (which is about what I pay for Netflix movies). I read about 65 books a year and start, but don’t finish, another 15 or so. To borrow 80 titles a year, I am willing to pay $160, or roughly twice what Amazon Prime costs now.