Only because, in this realm, Amazon came in as a small dog barking at iTunes. And they’re only DRM-free, they’re not DR-free: it’s still illegal to transfer them to another party.

Unless another power player wants to break into the ebook market, there’s no reason for anyone to start a push for DRM-free ebooks. And with all the major players already vested to one extent or another, there aren’t a lot of candidates.

Well, yes, libraries scan journal articles to send via email, but this is, in fact, done through ILL if it is done legally. ILL offices take care of the copyright tracking and payments involved. If your library is just scanning and sending articles, your staff is unaware of the law or openly flouting it.

I am going to make some assumptions on this.

Assuming that you can fit 1.5 pages on a 8×11 standard sheet of paper and that you have a duplexing printer, then you can fit 3 pages per book on front and back of a sheet of paper.

Assuming that the book in question has 600 pages, then you would need 200 sheets of paper to print it out.

Figures are for a high end Xerox Phaser 8560, which has one of the cheaper costs per page.
Cost per piece of paper = .005
Cost to print in B&W per page face = .015

We arrive at the cost to print out a copy of said book as $7.00.

Keep in mind, that most libraries do not have a high end printer such as this and that the lower end typically has a cost of around .03 per page which would bring the same book in at $14.00 to print.

I seriously doubt that printing them out a reasonable fee will ever come about.

I used a recent hard cover non-fiction book that sells for 28.95 (pre-processed) at Ingram with my library’s discount as the example, so even if you only print out 5 copies of the book, it would still be cheaper in the long run to purchase a physical copy.

Now digital, if the rights could be worked out, is a different story.

I know you’re not big on the ALA but the Code of Ethics is stymied by both Capitalism and Mickey Mouse Copyright Laws. Specifically, intellectual freedom and equitable access. Article 4 directly contradicts and hinders the previous three Articles.

Once we, as a profession, pick a side on that issue (the corporations or the people) that will decide who wins.

But digital content worries me in some ways. First, because publishers really don’t like the right of first purchase– the used book market really bugs them. I’m not actually sure what they think of libraries, but if a library buys a book and loans it out a hundred times, I know they’d rather collect a hundred fees. They’re not going to sell titles, they’re going to license them– and control them.

Second is the centralized collection. Consider that if your university library burns down with all copies of the Philosophical Transactions journal, it is still available from other libraries all over the world, with collections going back to the 1700′s. But if the archiver of a digital collection loses its archives, or changes its business model or goes out of business and nobody is willing to fork over whatever price they ask for taking over the archive, it just goes away. When people talk about these digital collections, they’re not talking about a library PURCHASING a copy to store on their own servers for as long as they please. They’ll be available through the internet, not the intranet. Libraries wouldn’t want to purchase their own copies, anyway, because that means they’d have to handle the equipment costs. But I’d be a little more comfortable if there were thousands of duplicate digital collections laying around instead of just one.

Third is the TRANSIENT nature of a digital collection. Digital files stored in a central server can be altered without notice. This might be as insidious as bowing to political pressures to change an unpopular opinion. Or at least unpopular with the right people. And not necessarily with gummint people– the drug cartels in Mexico are doing enough damage to the press as it is, you could imagine them telling the reporters to rewrite history or watch their families die (which is pretty much the same thing that they’re doing right now). Or it could be as innocent as updating an encyclopedia article or a manual, with earlier versions no longer available for historical researchers or people using old equipment or whatever. And customers who purchased a license can wake up one day to find it revoked. Think it won’t happen in practice?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/forum/cd/discussion.html?ie=UTF8&cdForum=FxECU9GDEAX44K&cdThread=Tx1AI03UTV0IOMF

We’re also going to have to start worrying about whether a book is compatible with the reader we happen to have bought. And they’re pretty pricey, a big up-front cost before you can start reading, so it’s not like we can expect everyone to just buy one of all of them.

I’m not worried about publishers going away. If they don’t get their digital rights management in order they just won’t offer their books in such an easily pirated form. But I think they’ll get their digital rights management in order.

And are paper and ink cartridges going to be free as well in this thought experiment’s world?

This assumes that you have the rights to reprint, and/or the work is digitized. How many thousands of works don’t fall into either category?

Well, they aren't free. Libraries buy books, usually with taxpayer dollars. If a library buys a book for $10 and 10 people read it, taxpayers have subsidized those readers at $1.00 per person. Suppose the library never buys the book, but pays a $1.00 fee each time it's read. If 10 people read the book, same difference, same cost. Market forces will assure the overall balance just as they do now. In theory at least, libraries will be able to increase significantly the pool of resources available to their clients. Whether the books are made available through cheap print-on-demand or on loaner eReaders or downloaded to iPhones just depends on balancing costs and market demand. Think $35 tablet devices.

What's definitely going on life-support soon is ILL. It costs less to print most books using print-on-demand than to process an ILL plus shipping both ways. ILL has been dead for journal articles for quite a while. Most libraries just do an electronic scan and email it along.

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