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TOR, publisher of
science fiction and fantasy books, has been a venue for new and
upcoming speculative fiction writers, especially through
its website, TOR.com. Not only have unknown writers made a name for
themselves when publishing on the website but also when TOR has
licensed the electronic version of their books to libraries. However,
TOR has been doing less of that lately. They put an embargo on
libraries’ lending of newly
published e-books back in July and so a library cannot loan
them out until four
months after their release. The
reason for this embargo is, as TOR claims, to
test the impact on sales
from library e-book
lending.
Librarians, however,
have done their own study of such impact and say it is small and
insignificant, according to Publishers Weekly.
Publishers Weekly itself says that potential sales impact on
an author-by-author basis is small. So not even the authors of these
books are financially hurting. So maybe it has more to do with TOR as
a big publisher staying in economic power, global corporate power to
be exact, than it does losing money. After all, an e-book, like a
print one, only checks out to a limited number of people due to
restrictions on the licence that the library purchases from the
publisher. However, the problem with the TOR embargo on e-book
lending isn’t so much a decline in sales or a taking away of a
source from libraries but rather the lack of communication between
publisher and library.
I’m not at all a
fan of e-books myself. But, because they’re a
demanding market in this age of digital addiction, in order to get my
work known I keep myself open to that format while also being sure to
put my work in print. And I won’t deny that the e-book has played a
major part in making my books known to a wider audience than if they
were limited to print editions. Steve Potash, founder and CEO of
OverDrive, a distributor of digital content, says that making e-books
available in libraries helps authors and publishers get their books
discovered and increases sales from library purchases of the books
(via licences). Both he and ReadersFirst, a coalition of
libraries, think the suspected decline in TOR’s sales may be due
not to library e-book lending but to Amazon’s sales ofself-published e-books.
This may be so, since Amazon has become a major empire in online
retail. Still, Amazon has been another venue that has allowed unknown
authors to expose their books to a wider audience. That’s
been the
case with my fictional
work.
But I personally
don’t think the problem is with the decline of sales or TOR taking
away from libraries a venue of e-book lending. The real problem is
that TOR did not discuss or make known their testing plans to
librarians ahead of time, as Library Journal indicated in an
interview with a library expert.
News of the embargo came to librarians after the fact, catching
librarians by surprise and making them feel left out of the
decision-making process even if TOR may have had the right to stop
selling them the licences of newly released e-books. But libraries
are community institutions that work with businesses and
non-businesses (non-profits and individual citizens) alike. Even
though libraries’ dealings with TOR have involved a global
corporation, still, especially in this age of internet and social
media, it’s a community relationship. Or at least it should be
treated as one. More recently, Penguin Random House has been shown to
use more of this kind of model of library-publisher relationship in
deciding on a change in its e-book lending terms, one that does not
involve an embargo.
Even if for
different reasons, libraries and big publishing houses like TOR have
a common goal: to promote the author. So if a major change is going
to impact either library or publisher it should be discussed between
the two and not just be done in obscurity by one or the other. Even
the entire world is a community when you think about it, but
especially these days with internet.
Until next time . .
.
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