From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 18:49:09 -0500

I was reading the Charleston talk of the estimable Bill Hannay, who
appears there each year in Ann's popular "Long Arm of the Law" session
to update librarians on current legal cases.  This year he focused on
the Apple price-fixing and the ongoing Google books cases and set me
to thinking . . .

The first sale doctrine and the protection it gives libraries in print
space is a thing of beauty.  Libraries can buy a book and lend it a
hundred times or until it falls apart and the world is a better place.
 But it might seem that there is a downside.  The hundred borrowers
didn't buy the book -- so should we count that as economic cost to
publishers of having the first sale doctrine?

It would seem that publishers think so by their behavior in e-space
and their evident horror at the thought that anybody would be lending
e-books.  First sale doesn't apply because they don't sell, they
license, so they can make up the rules, and the rules these days
mainly exclude borrowing or put a very high price tag on the book that
will be borrowed.  But consider . . .

1.  If I read a library book without buying it, it doesn't necessarily
mean I would have bought it otherwise.  Perhaps I was thinking of this
because I read a library book this weekend that I'd been handling in
bookshops on three continents and two languages for a year and finally
just borrowed and read.  I was resisting that purchase.  So the lost
sale per borrow is some small fraction of 1.

2  But libraries buy lots of books that get limited use or no use --
*or* at least no use that would have led to a purchase.  Amazon sent
me by mistake this week a second-hand copy of *Critical Essays on
Edward Albee* pub. 1975 deaccessioned from a public library in a far
western suburb of Chicago.  It was in *mint* condition.  That was a
sale to the good for a publisher.

3.  I sat in the Georgetown library today admiring a book that I've
known of for years but underestimated; admired it so much that I went
ahead and purchased it from Amazon on the spot.  That's another sale
to the good for the publisher.

So my easier question is:  is there a way to quantify the economic
impact libraries have on sales of books that takes factors like these
into account?  Are libraries not in fact a net plus?

My harder question then would be:  is there a way to apply such
thinking to assuage the fears of publishers trying to sell e-books and
introduce a little more rationality into the marketplace?

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown

(And no, I still haven't recovered all the Google Play books that
evaporated when I dared to open my iPad in Singapore in August.  The
Google Play app is, by my own experience and that of the people who
review it in the app store, just plain broken and Google has lost
interest.  They promised me they'd fix it, but then just faded away.)