ebooks on borrowed time
Ebooks were supposed to be indestructible. Where you had disk-space, you had literature – in perpetuity. Which is bad news for publishers now deprived of that extra round of sales revenue engendered by books being dropped in baths.
HarperCollins has got wise to this: it has announced that US libraries will be allowed to lend ebooks only up to 26 times. Its sales president, Josh Marwell, believes that’s only fair: 26, he claims, is the average number of loans a print book would survive before having to be replaced. HarperCollins UK won’t rule out applying this ebook strategy to British libraries - and should it do so, it can expect a frustrated reaction. “Clearly, printed books last a lot longer than 26 loans,” says Philip Bradley, vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.
This is the dumbest shit I have ever read. (I work for Collins — the British half of HarperCollins — incidentally, and this is far from the dumbest shit they are guilty of.)
22 Notes