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When Owning Isn’t Owning

In her latest post on the ALA TechSource blog Jenny Levine discusses libraries, digital content, and DRM. Her central point is the one I’ve been making for a while now:

“But therein lies the problem, because while RGPL THINKS it owns the content in the traditional sense of the term—in the same way it thinks it own the books, CDs, and DVDs it has purchased—it DOESN’T. Because digital content is different from physical content, in that there is no right of first sale for it, despite the seemingly reassuring terms of the signed agreement.”

I have no problem with libraries lending digital content (never mind thaccessibilityty problems; e-books on an iPoanyonenw?) but the problem is that the library doesn’t own the content nor does it ultimately have control over said content. The content provider sets the length of loan time (which most libraries don’t seem to mind for some reason) but, more importantly, what happens when the content provider goes out of business? Bye bye content. What then?

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Published by Michael Sauers

Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.

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