If books were available on a pay per read (listen) model, then surely the best content would prevail.

On a side note, have any posters here have statistics on the life in years of your typical physical audiobook and also the number of times it gets loaned during it’s life. Also any stats on broken or lost CD’s or tapes?

A-B-Newbie

The inability of Overdrive to allow early return of material is plain stupid. It’s a computer. That’s what they’re for: Stuff like managing things that can be measured and recorded in an automated fashion. Click. Done. What the heck’s the problem?

The limited number of times that an Overdrive audiobook can circulate would be a dealbreaker for me. It sounds too much like another step toward publishers making the reading experience analogous to such ‘pay every time’ models as rollercoaster rides. Another nail in the coffin of the Right of First Purchase.

And NetLibrary was much less expensive than Overdrive (mostly due to initial setup costs). But Overdrive seems to be the way public libraries are going.

From the academic world, most faculty I speak with know of, if not use, Audible, but almost none of them have even heard of Librivox, Radiohead’s recent release, etc.

I agree with what everyone has said so far, which is the problem in this space. We keep imposing limitations from the physical world and “understand why” without having a better (for everyone, including the writers/artists) model to replace it.

The only part I’ll really disagree with is dsa’s take on the profession. This is going to be such a huge market in the next 5-10 years that if libraries were to voluntarily remove themselves from the table, then we’ll voluntarily remove ourselves from serving our patrons digital content. I totally agree we need to negotiate these things better, but we just don’t have that much clout (see also “banding together” above). In Illinois and Ohio, we tried to throw a hee-uge chunk of money at Audible to let us circulate files to patron iPods, but it didn’t work because they don’t see us as a viable market. Our influence right now is about the same regardless of whether we are existing customers or not.

We have to come up with something other than a) blindly signing contracts, or b) walking away until the entertainment industry wants to play nice (see also “hell freezes over”). I have an idea about how to push this issue, but there’s no library in the country that could afford the legal fees to do it.

I’m offended by all of this, too, but I’m perhaps even more offended by my profession, which signs contracts with firms, and then protests mightily when said firms do something cretinous, as many eventually do (see the Science/JSTOR debacle for a recent example). Once someone has your money, your ability to influence their behavior is very limited. I’d prefer to see all the dyspepsia that vendors cause in librarians occur before the contract is signed, not after. The recent move by the MPG to cancel their Springer contract is a rare example of this, of which I’d like to see more.

The other is that the audiobook is effectively sold with the same rights as a book or a CD or a DVD, and there’s where “copyright centrist” comes in. I believe that’s appropriate as long as writers (and readers, in the case of audiobooks) and publishers aren’t being paid by The State. The content doesn’t have a “fixed limitation of how many times it can circulate” (at least I don’t think it does)–like any other circulating item, you can lend ***that copy*** as many times as you wish, one circulation at a time.

That’s not bizarre: That’s the way libraries have always worked. Otherwise, in a state with universal borrowing, Overdrive would sell exactly one copy of an audiobook. I’m not sure that’s a workable economic model (and the anti-copyright “bands should just earn their livings by touring and selling tchotchkes” concept really doesn’t work for audiobook readers and producers–or for writers, for that matter, since most of us really don’t have rock star potential).