Saturday, January 7, 2012

Libraries save us from piracy?

One of Publisher Weekly's most dynamic blogs, the PWxyz blog has called attention to something that often gets lost in the discussion about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and other discussions about the right of individuals to access content. Besides being technically unwieldly and probably unworkable, SOPA deprives people of the right to find out about digital content they might otherwise not encounter. For more than a century public libraries have served to let people find books, magazines, and other content they either never heard about or cannot afford to purchase. Most people learn to love a book or an author by reading material borrowed from a library--or sometimes from a friend. Reading it once, or listening to music once, isn't always enough, so library borrowers turn into buyers. That's been happening with books all these years and it can happen to ebooks too. Most people are willing to pay a reasonable amount of money to purchase material they want to keep as long as buying it is made convenient. Instead of helping libraries by allowing them to lend ebooks to their cardholders, many publishers have worked to restrict lending. Somehow they believe the model that has worked for a century and more in developing devoted readers won't work any more. Instead of trying to restrict use, publishers ought to work with libraries to enable more people access to both print and digital content. Readers, authors, and publishers all benefit from having a community invested in producing and consuming artistic content. Let's call for sanity instead of SOPA.

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