What happens when ebooks enter libraries? We hear stories from some of the librarians who were there at the time.
Robin Hastings 00:00
Yeah, yeah. That was one thing. People just did not realize how much we paid for those early ebooks because they were so cheap on Kindle. Yeah. You know, there for a while the Kindle, average Kindle book was $1.99.
Laura Crossett 00:13
Yeah.
Robin Hastings 00:14
That was not what we were paying in the library.
Laura Crossett 00:16
Well, and even now, you know, an ebook for the consumer is ten or fifteen dollars maybe, and for libraries, as we know and we'll get into much, much more.
Laura Crossett 00:40
Welcome back to A Podcast About Ebooks from Library Futures, a three part mini series that’s going to tell you how ebooks came to be, what happened when they entered libraries, and what we can do about the problems that ensued. I'm Laura, Communications Manager at Library Futures.
Mary Needham 00:56
And I'm Mary, intern at Library Futures.
Laura Crossett 01:00
And that was Robin Hastings, now Library Consultant at the Northeast Kansas Library System, and we were talking about back in the early days of library ebooks, just a few years after 2007 when the Amazon Kindle launched. This is Episode 2: Ebooks Meet Libraries; Libraries Meet Ebooks. In this episode, we're going to hear directly from some of the librarians who were on the ground in the early days of library ebooks. I think their experiences, including some of my own, will introduce some of the issues we were grappling with then and still are now. What makes a digital file different from a physical book, what makes it hard for a library to purchase, preserve and lend an ebook in the way that they always have print books? Some of that, it turns out, is tied to the history of ereaders.
Mary Needham 01:51
Right. And the late 90s and the early aughts on explosion of ereaders, from the Rocket Ebook /Softbook to the Sony Reader, to the Kindle, to the Barnes & Noble Nook. And you can learn more about those on the interactive timeline on our website, libraryfutures.net ,and there will also be a link to that in the show notes. So what's happening with e readers? What's happening with libraries and ebooks?
Laura Crossett 02:17
Wow, some of those ebook reader names bring things back to me, but for now, Robin has a little bit more of that story.
Robin Hastings 02:28
So my name is Robin Hastings. I am a – I was just thinking about this the other day. Math is not my my strong suit, but I am a 26 year veteran of libraries. I started out as an IT person, tech, uh, tech nerd, and got infected by the bug of, of providing information, whether through books or technology, to our patrons. So that's, that's how I got started.
Mary Needham 03:02
Do you remember the first time that you encountered an ebook?
Robin Hastings 03:05
I actually do not, because, and I know this because I would have sworn it was with OverDrive. We got OverDrive in the Missouri River Regional Library pretty early in the ebook era. But as I was going through my old blog posts the other day, I realized we had a service prior to OverDrive called NetLibrary. If right now you click on that, it takes you to a 404 page in EBSCO, so [laughter] so we know we can probably figure out what happened there, but, but yeah, we had NetLibrary at the library before OverDrive came.
Laura Crossett 03:44
So according to OverDrive's website, they had launched their first library ebook platform in 2003 which is the year before I started library school. But my first real experience like Robin’s was also with NetLibrary, and we had a little fun reminiscing about that. Yeah, I was, I was going back through and, like, kind of trying to make a timeline here, and NetLibrary was my first exposure, but my memory is that we only had audio books through NetLibrary and not print. But I also I could be wrong,
Robin Hastings 04:19
It was not clear in my web or in my blog.
Laura Crossett 04:22
That's okay. It was a, I know that it was a very involved process
Robin Hastings 04:26
Mmm hmm.
Laura Crossett 04:27
to get your NetLibrary. And we, we may only – I was working in Wyoming at the time, which is all one library system. We may only have had audio books, and there were actual, like ebooks, but yeah. There is, I've said this to Mary many times, and I think we'll be including it in the timeline for this episode – there is a classic comic from that era called “Why DRM Doesn't Work, or How to Get an Audiobook from the Cleveland Public Library.” And it's like download. Windows Media Player, get an error, install something else on your computer, restart, you know, log in, and then it, like, goes through, like, you know, these many steps, and then ends with “visit BitTorrent site.”
Robin Hastings 05:15
Just download it from BitTorrent, yeah, yeah. Or Limewire, yeah, yeah, those.
Laura Crossett 05:23
Anyway, the first library books I remember were a lot like that, and there were all these different ereaders and all these different file formats, and all of them worked a little differently, and we all had to learn them all. I talked to Michael Blackwell a while back. He's now the director at the St Mary's County Library in Maryland. But in 2010 he was working at the Columbus Metropolitan Library as a branch manager, and he was chosen to lead the library's ebook initiative. And I think he sums up really well what it was like at that time.
Michael Blackwell 05:56
Really don't know why they chose me. I had never seen an e book before. I had never held an e book reader. I knew a little bit about them, but I think it was just because I had done a couple other system wide initiatives, and they said, “Well, he's our guy.” So I had to work with a team to design – it was a system wide initiative – to design tables that held seven devices that people would come in use. We had to train staff to use those seven devices to get library content, get people comfortable with the whole idea of what digital content was and how to provide library digital content.
Laura Crossett 06:36
Robin also remembered a bit about this time and the difficulty of just getting devices so we could learn to use them.
Robin Hastings 06:44
I went to the Barnes and Noble in Jefferson City and tried to get them to donate a nook to us so that we could help patrons using to use the Nook. If I recall correctly, I was unsuccessful. But I was like, that would be, you know, they're coming to us to ask how to use our services with your product. Maybe we should, you know, we could help you if we had access to your product, but we didn't. I think my mother-in-law eventually got a Nook, but by then it was…
Laura Crossett 07:15
Yeah, I remember like, finally at the library I was at just bought one of everything –
Robin Hastings 07:21
Yeah
Laura Crossett 07:22
– because they had the budget at the time, but, like, we relied a lot on donations from patrons, so then you would have, like a model or two previous to whatever –
[laughter]
Robin Hastings 07:33
Yes, yeah.
Laura Crossett 07:35
– people had. So yeah, I feel like OverDrive really figuring out that if they made everything kind of app based, they could, you know, really reduce the friction. But that happened kind of like at the same time that the publishing industry was, you know, ramping up checkout limits and licensing restrictions and whatnot and and jacking up prices.
[laughter]
So yeah, that was easier it got to check out the ebook, the harder it got to get them
Robin Hastings 08:09
Yeah.
Laura Crossett 08:10
And Rochelle Hartman, who was then the adult services manager at the La Crosse Public Library in Wisconsin, described the situation really well in a blog post from December 2010 called “Ereaders, OverDrive compatibility, Libraries as Digital Content Ghost Towns,” and I had her record a little bit of that blog post for us. She starts by talking about how she visited the Nook kiosk at her local Barnes and Noble.
Rochelle Hartman 08:39
I introduced myself as someone from the library who wanted to make sure Barnes and Noble staff understood exactly what we had to offer. Since I wasn't sure the right message was getting out.
Laura Crossett 08:51
Rochelle runs through some of the same file format ereader mess that we've already discussed, and then she talks about the real reason everyone wants an ereader: Books.
Rochelle Hartman 09:05
After this, we co-browse the OverDrive interface and look at what is available. As of this writing, there are only 1262 ebook titles available to the entire state of Wisconsin. If you click on currently available ebooks, that number goes down to 149, usually the same titles every time, such as the riveting tome Blueprint Reading and Careers in Engineering. There are also several series of graphic novels, which is not typically what our folks are looking for. There also tend to be a high number of holds on the popular titles.
Laura Crossett 09:52
Did you hear that “high number of holds on popular titles?”
Mary Needham 09:57
Yeah, I did that.
Laura Crossett 09:58
That is going to come back to haunt us. So the major publishers in the US, which is, now they're the Big Five. Before that, they were the Big Six. They almost became the Big Four, until there was a court that blocked a merger of Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster. Anyway, the Big Five control 80% of the trade book market in the US, and they have a similarly outsized impact on the library ebook market, which we're going to learn more about in Episode 3.
Mary Needham 10:30
I'm really excited to learn more about that, because that 80% is such a large percentage. Wow,
Laura Crossett 10:36
I know, right. So those early days of ebooks and libraries were really frustrating, and they were frustrating technologically, and they were frustrating in terms of ebook availability, and both of those things were a direct result of the publishing industry's real opposition to libraries owning and lending ebooks. If you look at the literature from that time, they'll talk about, a lot about how there needs to be friction when you're borrowing a library ebook, because otherwise everyone will just steal books. And as we've heard, there was definitely some friction, both in terms of what library ebooks you can buy and in terms of the challenges of checking them out. But what we didn't know at that time was that library ebooks were about to become frustrating in a whole new way. As Michael Blackwell put it,
Michael Blackwell 11:30
after about 2013, 2014 really, we had kind of solved some of the technical issues. It was no longer the case that it took 21 steps to get an ebook into a library patrons hand, which at one point it did.
Laura Crossett 11:47
I remember.
Michael Blackwell 11:49
And we worked with the library vendors to streamline the services, improve by using APIs through apps. And they all bought in. They had a, you know, a stake in that being a better experience. But then we began to take note of the fact that, early on, the Big Five, especially, were offering ebooks on perpetual access at about $14. It was basically hard cover price perpetual access. It didn't take them long to figure out that maybe that wasn't their best deal, and I would happen to agree. I mean, perpetual access, it's never going to wear out at 14 bucks. Maybe that wasn't as fair to the publishers as we could have done. But since then, the deals have really gotten worse and worse. So now we're looking at things like for a two year access, something might cost $124.
Laura Crossett 12:54
And now we're getting to some of the ebook issues listeners might be more familiar with, especially if you follow the work of Library Futures: ebook licensing costs. HarperCollins really kicked things off when they announced in 2011 but then on they were done letting libraries buy a perpetual license for an ebook. And I should note here that a perpetual license isn't really the same as owning something. It's what you get when you, quote, “buy” almost any digital thing, as I'm sure anyone who was frantically trying to download their Kindle library in early 2025 could tell you, but it did, that perpetual license, it implied that at least you'd have perpetual access to that book. But the Harper Collins announcement changed all that. Libraries would get a license for 26 checkouts, and then if they wanted to keep that book in their collection, they'd have to buy it again, or, as we like to say, they'd have to rent it again.
[Music]
Mary Needham 14:09
Tune in next episode, where we'll learn more about just what it means to rent a book. Stay tuned for Episode 3 wherever fine podcasts are found.
Laura Crossett 14:22
This has been Episode 2 of A Podcast About Ebooks for Library Futures. If anything you've heard about here intrigues you, there is a link to Mary's excellent interactive ebook timeline in the show notes, as well as links to all of our sources. Library Futures is a project of the Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law and Policy at New York University. Find us online at libraryfutures.net where you can sign up for our low volume newsletter and follow us on social media @libraryfutures.
Mary Needham 14:54
We'd like to thank Robin Hastings, Michael Blackwell, Rochelle Hartman and the many other librarians who shared their experiences with library ebooks over the years. At Library Futures, thanks to executive director Jenny Rose Halperin and Michelle Reed, Director of Programs, including our amazing internship program. Thanks to Michael Weinberg at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy for his support and excellent feedback. Matthew Whiteley wrote our theme music.
Laura Crossett 15:21
And enormous thanks to all libraries and librarians everywhere, with extra thanks to the NYU Libraries, the Iowa City Public Library, and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library at San Jose State University for providing the resources and expertise that inform our work. We'd also like to give a special shout out to the Internet Archive for their work in preserving so many of the blog posts, news articles, podcasts and other materials that aided our research and that contained so much of the history of ebooks in libraries. Thanks to you Mary!
Mary Needham 15:56
And thanks to you Laura!
Laura Crossett 15:58
Until next time! Bye!
Mary Needham 14:54
Bye!
[music]