From: "Prestamo, Anne" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:46:22 +0000

{The following is posted on behalf of Jamie Larue, Director of the
Douglas County Libraries. }

Anne Prestamo kindly offered to post my response to some of your very
interesting comments on this list about my library's deal with
Smashwords, following the creation of our own digital content
management system.

There are several aspects of that deal that don't seem to have been discussed.

First, instead of a contract for licensing, we are trying to urge the
adoption of a "Statement of Common Understanding." You can find it,
and other documents seeking to establish a new industry standard, at
http://evoke.cvlsites.org/resources-guides-and-more/letters-forms-agreements/.

In this statement, we're trying to get as close to First Sale rights
as we can, and reduce costs (both for creating contracts and
monitoring them). The general conditions reflect what publishers are
mostly concerned about: we add DRM (so they won't get ripped off), we
restrict access to one user at a time (a huge concern for many
publishers). We tell them we'll buy additional "copies" based on
demand, and we even provide a link for the direct purchase by
consumers -- for which we typically get a share. We also promise not
to transfer or sell the copy WE have purchased (which I've told them
we may eventually want to revisit). Most of our business is driven by
what's new, and we are often severely constrained by space. So we
withdraw a lot of older books. Now, for the first time, we are
starting to grow that long tail.

Second, despite the use on this forum to describe our Smashwords
purchases in such terms as "essentially worthless," "a lot of
rubbish," and "garbage," we actually attempted to exercise some
discretion in the expenditure of public dollars. (We're librarians,
right?) The algorithm had a number of factors: sales were first (and
as Eric Hellman pointed out, several Smashwords titles are on the NYT
bestseller list right now), the price set by authors second, and then
some subject filtering. We're a public library, so mostly we have
focused on the collection of genre fiction.

Is all of the content great? No. But then, a lot of the content
libraries have bought for years either never goes out at all, or goes
out like crazy but is poorly written (witness the number one title of
the year that resulted in $5,000 cash bonuses for everyone at Random
House). Even well-reviewed works (by the one librarian who wrote the
review, which may be vetting to some people...) sometimes bomb. As for
the librarian (?) who asked about our Smashwords titles, "did the
[Douglas County Libraries] librarians actually read all of the books
themselves before buying them?" Um. No.

But there have been some happy surprises, too. I've found a lot of
older works whose copyright has reverted to the author, and now makes
a second entry as an epub. They're beautifully written, and perfectly
formatted. We may even have had them before, and I'm glad to see them
back. Now, we can keep them. There are some new items by previously
published authors who already have a following, and simply prefer not
to give 90% of their profit to someone else (and yes, they pay to have
their works edited). And there are some brand new writers whose works
are just fringe enough that mainstream publishers wouldn't touch them
-- and they're pretty darn interesting.

The bottom line: I believe that self-publishing represents the future.
We needed, in libraryland, to do some experiments so we could get a
little smarter about how to sample, manage, and (where appropriate)
promote what's happening. We've learned a lot. We've also created a
digital branch, in the space of about 18 months, of some 14,000
mainstream commercial titles, 11,000 midlist and independent
publishers' offerings, and now 10,000 self-published. And of the over
800 new publishers and authors we've dealt with, almost all of them
have offered 40-45% discounts at a time when the big six were charging
us 5-7 times retail, when they would bother to sell to us at all.

And that's the report from our front. What all have you folks done
that we could try?

Anne Prestamo
Claud D. Kniffin Professor of Library Service and Education
Associate Dean for Collection and Technology Services
Oklahoma State University Libraries
Email: [log in to unmask]