Skip to main content

Library authors petition

I ask for your assistance. If you are a librarian, or have written a book for the library professional audience, what do you think of this idea?

* We create a petition, circulated among all professional library publishing houses.

* The petition states our strong desire to donate an e-book copy of works we have written to a library of our choice. I'm not asking to "lease a copy to a library through a third party." I'm petitioning, perhaps in violation of contracts that were framed a long time ago, to give ownership of a copy to a library that can check it out to one person at a time, with DRM-management. Or without, if you have strong feelings about that.

* We assert, as authors and librarians, our belief that books should be owned and managed by libraries. We protest the disappearance of ownership.

* We assert, as authors and librarians, that it's absurd that a book that costs nothing to print, bind, and distribute should cost MORE than print. It should cost less. Yet, again, the idea is not to demand that publishers charge less. It's that we believe we should have the right to donate a copy of our works to a library.

* We assert, as authors and librarians, that having our works in libraries helps people find us, and that matters to us.

* We assert, as authors and librarians, that we want our works to endure. Libraries preserve the memory of our culture.

* We assert, as authors and librarians, our intent to adopt an addendum to any contract with a publisher, our desire to sell copies of our works to libraries. Not lease. Sell, under the doctrine of first use.

I recognize that some of us don't HAVE e-book versions of our books. But we could create them, couldn't we? And that might be a useful skill to develop, don't you think?

We would be the first group of authors that I'm aware of to set a new expectation for the agreement between authors, publishers, and libraries. And why wouldn't we be first?

I think this just might bring some attention to e-book issues not only within our field, but in the larger business world, and perhaps as important, the world of public opinion.

Please post your thoughts below. I'm interested not only in the substance of the petition, but how we might begin to publicize it.

Comments

Michael Sauers said…
Jamie,

I'm so all over this one. Count me in 100%. Considering that I've had discussions with at least one of my publishers who still won't release eCopies of my books I'm ready to sign on. (Oh, and I've downloaded pirated copies anyway so they might as well try to monetize them.)

Also, and I don't know if this is too-short of a time-frame, but I'll be attending a dinner meeting with another one of my publishers at Computers in Libraries next week, and they're looking for each author to bring "one idea" on how to better market their books. Any chance we could have something presentable by then?

Michael Sauers
waltc said…
While I would say that creating an e-version of a book isn't always that simple, I'd probably sign this petition. (Dunno if Livermore Public would really want e-copies of my books, though.)
Jamie said…
Thank you, gentlemen. Let me see who else responds to this over the next few days, and we'll see how much farther we can take it.

Popular posts from this blog

Uncle Bobby's Wedding

Recently, a library patron challenged (urged a reconsideration of the ownership or placement of) a book called "Uncle Bobby's Wedding." Honestly, I hadn't even heard of it until that complaint. But I did read the book, and responded to the patron, who challenged the item through email and requested that I respond online (not via snail-mail) about her concerns. I suspect the book will get a lot of challenges in 2008-2009. So I offer my response, purging the patron's name, for other librarians. Uncle Bobby's wedding June 27, 2008 Dear Ms. Patron: Thank you for working with my assistant to allow me to fit your concerns about “Uncle Bobby's Wedding,” by Sarah S. Brannen, into our “reconsideration” process. I have been assured that you have received and viewed our relevant policies: the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read, Free Access to Libraries for Minors, the Freedom to View, and our Reconsideration Policy. The intent of providing all tha

Installing Linux on a 2011 Macbook Pro

I had two MacBook Pros, both 13" models from late 2011. One had 4 gigs of RAM, and the other 8. Both of them were intolerably slow. In the first case, I wound up installing CleanMyMac , which did arcane things to various files, and put up alerts to warn me about disappearing memory. But it made the machine useable again, albeit not exactly speedy. I changed some habits: Safari as browser rather than Firefox or Chrome. I tried to keep tabs down to four or five. The second Mac had bigger problems. Its charger was shot, but even with that replaced, the battery tapped out at 75%. More importantly, the whole disk had been wiped, which meant that it wouldn't boot. Recently, I had downloaded a couple of Linux distributions ("distros") on USB drives. Elementary OS 5.1 (Hera) was reputed to be a lightweight, beautiful distro that shared some aesthetics with the Mac OS. So I thought I'd give it a try. Ahead of time, I tried to read up on how difficult it might be to

The enemies of literature

Every year, apologists for the restriction of reading stumble over themselves to "mock" Banned Books Week. Walther (Oct 1, 2023's " The Enemies of Literature ") upholds the grand tradition. Complaints about banning, the argument goes, are simply false. Walther writes, "In zero cases since the advent of Banned Books Week has a local or state ordinance been passed in this country that forbids the sale or general possession of any of the books in question." Yet Texas HB 900 was passed on June 13 of this year. It requires book vendors to assign ratings to books based only on the presence of depictions or references to sex. If a book is "sexually explicit" and has no direct connection to required curriculum, it must be pulled from the school. (One wonders what happens to the Bible, and its story of Lot's daughters, first offered by their father for gang rape, and whom he later sleeps with.) In Arkansas, legislation stated that school and pu