Remember back to the innocent days just before COVID turned the world on its head and we were blissfully unaware of NFTs and generative AI? As 2019 closed and 2020 dawned, one of the things keeping people in the book world up at night was the raging battle between libraries and publishers over e-book lending.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Libraries believed it was their role to get as many people reading as possible. Publishers thought libraries weren’t paying enough for e-books they then lent out many times over, cannibalizing the income of an already-stretched book business.
So, publishers introduced new ways of getting more money—like metered lending and shorter licenses—and libraries thought those publishers were gatekeeping access to culture.
A New Front in an Ongoing Battle
That debate, which has been, shall we just say, the last thing on libraries’ minds of late, has started simmering again thanks to a developing beef between Comics Plus and Penguin Random House.
Comics Plus, part of Library Pass, distributes electronic copies of comics to libraries and educational establishments, which subscribe to the service. It offers a curated selection that helps librarians and educators find material that fits the curricula they are teaching. It provides access to that material to subscribers on an unlimited basis. That seems to be a necessary part of the way education works. If you want to teach thousands of kids the same thing at the same time, they all need access to the materials.
A Publisher Pulls Out
The problem came when Penguin Random House acquired comic publisher Boom! PRH has a policy that it will not engage with unlimited subscription services. So, all of a sudden, Boom!’s comics were no longer accessible through Comics Plus.
I don’t want to comment on the rights and wrongs of how writers get paid for books lent out through libraries (I would note that’s a slightly different emphasis from PRH’s concern with how publishers get paid). But I do want to point out the debate hasn’t gone away.
Balancing access to reading and payment of creators is an age-old dilemma. It does feel, though, as though the landscape on which this is playing out—given the huge AI copyright battles raging—feels somewhat changed from back in 2019.
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