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.)