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]