Boycotts, Censorship, and Taking Action | Peer to Peer Review
Pondering the limits of "give 'em what they want" Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MNMar 3, 2011
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| Photo by Debora Miller |
Ever since librarians heard that HarperCollins intends to artificially limit the life of an ebook to 26 circulations, they have been sharing their outrage and discussing what action to take. One response to the issue has been to launch a boycott. Many librarians are uncomfortable with that. They worry that a boycott may be illegal; they wonder if it's not too extreme a response when perhaps the publisher can be reasoned with, or may simply be ineffective; others think a boycott is a form of censorship, that libraries can't ethically refuse to license materials from a given publisher because it limits access to information, and access is our prime directive.
I want to kick around the "censorship" issue, because it's an interesting one. I have a real problem with librarians throwing up their hands and claiming they can't take a principled stand because librarians are obliged to be neutral. Where did that idea come from? I am anything but neutral about equal access, intellectual freedom, and patron privacy. I am in no way neutral about the importance of valuing evidence in argument and in helping students make critical choices about their sources. Some sources are better than others, and some issues—like the historical fact of the Holocaust—do not have an equal but opposite "other side." Providing a balanced collection that offers multiple perspectives does not mean every idea is of equal worth or that librarians are not allowed to hold opinions.
But, refusing to buy anything from one of the big six publishers does have serious ramifications. It means that the library will not provide access to new books by authors who may not agree at all with HarperCollins' new limits. It means not acquiring valuable books that have something useful to say and that say it in a way that is unique. Books are not like consumer goods that can be substituted if we don't like the price. Each book offers a new and different perspective (unless it's written by James Patterson, Inc.). Deciding not to buy a book that presents important ideas is troubling to librarians—and it should be.
Nonetheless, we have for too long acquiesced to publishers and vendors whose practices go against our values. We've put satisfying our users' immediate needs ahead of the long-term ability to acquire and preserve knowledge. We are much better at giving our users what they want, right now, than explaining how doing so is criminally wasteful and is crippling our ability to preserve and protect information in the long run. One of the reasons faculty think libraries' main purpose it to buy the stuff they want is because that's what we do, with barely a peep.
Are we picking the right fight?
The HarperCollins issue is tricky because one publisher has just made an incredibly bone-headed move, but in the universe of bone-headed moves by publishers, it's not the worst offense. Two other major publishers—Macmillan and Simon & Schuster—are arguably more evil; they refuse to let libraries loan ebooks under any circumstances. But to switch up the rules to increase revenue just as libraries are being cut off at the knees seems both callous and ill-informed. And it's never pretty when a publisher decides they have to destroy books in order to save their business model.
This new system of digitally deleting a book after 26 check outs is counter-productive and badly timed, and if it spreads to other publishers, it will significantly decrease libraries' ability to provide content in digital form. It will not increase or preserve sales. It may bump up sales of a few popular books, but the trade-off will be that libraries will simply buy fewer books and less popular titles will not find a market. It's also a tough sell to the public, which has loyalty to authors but not to publishers—and no matter what HarperCollins says as it hides behind its authors' skirts, this is not about protecting them; they didn't consult their authors and many of them are not happy.
This is a lose-lose proposition, unless publishers are deliberately designing a digital future that doesn't include public libraries. I don't think that's the case. Long-term planning is not a strength of the book publishing industry, and after the collapse of Borders, publishers aren't likely to spurn a steady revenue stream even if it's small. I think it's merely a myopic attempt to wring more money out of libraries by treating digital files like print books. Like print books that are so badly produced they fall apart more quickly than usual. Though it's probably not the last straw, this decision seems to have claimed the honor of being the one that broke the camel's back and earned the wrath of Twitter.
Taking the long view
I think the time has come for all of us to step back and ask if we're creating healthy conditions for the long-term survival of accessible knowledge or if, by embracing digital deals with strings to satisfy our patrons' immediate but ignorant needs, we're letting our communities down, badly.
Karen Schneider put it well in her blog post, "HarperColllins' Memento Plan: Short-Term Greed Versus Long-Term Culture":
I'm most perturbed by the long-range implications of an economic model-already based on "license" versus "ownership"—that, if adopted by other publishers, would destroy the role literature plays as our culture's "memory work"—the growing opus collected and managed by libraries that help shape who we are as humans. . . .
. . . libraries are only partly about the here-and-now. We're also about preserving the cultural record. We cannot preserve ephemerally-licensed "content" that can be wrenched from us at the discretion of giant corporations. Right now, it appears the only safe technology for the cultural record, in terms of traditionally-published books, is the dead-tree format. I am not being technologically-backward to say that; I'm being culturally forward.
I'm boycotting ebooks altogether, because I consider it unwise to invest in an expensive system to download licensed ebooks when I can actually own books on paper and retain the significant rights that ownership conveys. But since my patrons are not actually asking for ebooks, that's too easy.
The bigger battleground for academic libraries is over journal and database subscriptions. A year and a half ago, we slashed our periodicals collection to shreds. We had to, to balance our budget. We thought we'd pared it back to the bare bones, but just this week we got renewal notices for two journals, one with a 40% increase in price, the other a 70% increase. The publishers—one a university press, the other a scholarly society that has outsourced its publishing to Taylor & Francis—apparently thought we can afford it. We can't.
Reader, I canceled them.
Oh, I consulted with the departments that are most affected. I didn't have to. To be honest, I doubt they would even notice they were gone. But I want the faculty to be aware of these price hikes, to feel a sense of solidarity with libraries and the future of scholarship, not just with their societies or their disciplinary habits.
Maybe someday we'll be grateful to HarperCollins for making librarians stop and think. Maybe this moment will make public libraries pause before they invest more public funds into consumer-unfriendly and unpreservable formats. One outcome of the kerfuffle has been the creation of an Ebook users' Bill of Rights that echoes many of the issues raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over a year ago, issues about which the public still remains blithely ignorant.
We have our work cut out for ourselves. This may be the first boycott of many.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
