Matadata – Librarianship 2.0.1

Yesterday my library meetup group had a visitor from a new service that calls itself a “Netflix for books”. The gentleman seems genuinely nice and polite. I have no problems with him as an human being. But considering the true nature of the business he is launching, part of me really thinks he had a lot of nerve showing up at our group and referring to his business as a private lending library, as if he was a librarian running an organization like the ones we work for. This is incorrect on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin; but begin I shall:

(1) The man’s company is for-profit. Most libraries are not. They’re either dependent on local community or government based funds, or are non-profit organizations that subsist on donations and/or endowments.

(2) As a for profit company, it has a goal of making money. The use of books to make that money does not make them a library. The book is nothing more to them than the widget they have chosen as a means to making money. This is antithetical to the nature and the purpose of libraries, who (at least in librarian dreams) are there to democratize the process of learning, and provide tools of education to their customers, not simply to sell objects to them.

(3) Unlike Netflix, which came into business with its closest direct competition being other businesses that rented movies (both Blockbuster-esque chains and more specialized “mom & pop” stores), the closest direct competition that this book rental service will have with libraries, who both rent books for free, and-due to being not-for profit companies-have had to turn in many cases to renting new, popular titles for a fee, in order to compensate for budgetary freezes and cuts that have been inflicted upon them by their outside funding sources. The new company, theoretically, will stand to take money away from libraries by setting up a competing book-rental for fees service–a service that libraries got into in the first place to help stem the tide of underfunded budgets. In communities where this library service exists, customers of the new rental service will actually be helping to further cripple their community libraries. Do the service’s co-owners care about this fact? Not likely, since, as I pointed out, they’re probably in this only for monetary success.

(4) Some of you may say “Wait, aren’t online services like Booksfree.com the actual competition for this new place?”. Well, yes and no. Yes, because they’re both doing the same thing (book rentals), and no, because most places like Booksfree are strictly into paperbacks, while this new company has promised that its customers will be able to get hardcovers, so the sales paradigm between the two is different. And, once again, the product they state they will offer is closer to what is provided by libraries, and thus competes directly with them for money and market share.

(5) Also, as Booksquare points out, these book rental services have business plans dissimilar to Netflix, which builds industry compensation into their bottom line. This also makes them less like first run book stores, and more in common with….that’s right, libraries. But since what I stated before shows that they actually aren’t libraries, what they are is competition for the same user group that libraries are supposed to fill.

(Though I must point out that I am in total disagreement with Booksquare’s author’s anti-used book stance, which negates one of the seemingly few parts of copyright law that benefits the consumer, and overlooks the fact that if a book is sold used, it stands to reason that it has already been sold new, meaning publisher and author have already collected the royalties they are due. To try to gain additional monies via each re-sale strikes me as simply greedy, and shows a lack of understanding of the fact that used book sales can actually lead to more new book sales–take away used book sales, or force used book prices higher in order to make producer re-compensation part of the package, and you reduce the number of copies on the market, and lessen the number of potential buyers that are exposed to a work, and wish to purchase a new copy of their own.)

In short, I’m not saying that this company is definitely going to take food out of my kid’s mouth (especially since I don’t have a kid), but neither the two co-creators nor the librarians that they speak to should delude themselves into thinking that their new endeavor resembles a library by any shape, form or means, or that this is a service that can co-exist with most libraries in anything other than a competitive (and perhaps even an antagonistic) relationship.