Re: most borrowed - Amazon borrowing 'facts'

On Fri, January 13, 2012 7:03 pm, joseph harris wrote:

> Which E-books Are Most Borrowed From Libraries

... which triggered a couple of tangents in my mind...

Since my local library started lending e-books I have done virtually all my
recreational reading with library books.

When I started writing ePubEditor, I called it an editor for good reason. One
of the major motivations was that the "big six" publishers have demonstrated a
pervasive cluelessness when it comes to producing e-books. Most of the e-books
I have checked out are almost unusable on my Android phone. In examining their
product I have seem paragraphs marked as <div class="tx">, centered,
non-paragraph snippets marked as <p class="centered"> and list items marked as
<div class="lsl1"> (without any markup as to when a list begins or ends). To
mis-quote Mitt Romney, the people who are producing this crap ought to be
fired.

As part of the development of ePubEditor I am developing a set of XSL scripts
that can be applied to various publishers' content to fix the horrid markup
that the big six don't seem to understand. In ePubEditor there is a "clean"
function that examines the stated publisher from the metadata, looks to see if
there is an XSL file stored for that publisher, and if so runs the XSL script
against all the HTML files in the ePub. Thus, my somewhat convoluted process
of getting a book from the library involves 1. downloading the ePub with Adobe
Digital Reader, 2. removing the DRM, 3. opening the ePub in ePubEditor and
runnng the "clean" function, 4. saving the cleaned ePub to a different storage
location, then 5. copying the cleaned ePub to my smart phone.

About 6 weeks ago, Penguin pulled new e-book titles from lending libraries.
Perhaps coincidentally, Penguin is the worst offender when it comes to
inappropriate and non-compliant markup. I must conclude that when it comes to
cluelessness, Penguin is the clear winner; I don't think the presence of their
books in lending libraries will be missed or their absence noted.

Occasionally, there have been books I have been interested in "trying" that my
local library did not have in e-book form. In all cases I have been able to
find something else "just as good", or at least "just as appealing". I have
concluded, that the kind of books that are amenable to the e-book form are
fungible; that is, they are easy to find a substitute for.

All of this has led me to postulate that there may be a new and better
approach to copyright violations.

If I were a professional writer I think I would want my work to be as
available as possible. I would insist that my publisher allow my work to be
placed in lending libraries where I would be assured of some remuneration for
my work, and where I would have a greater opportunity to be discovered by
readers "browsing the shelves."

At the same time I would be a vocal critic of libraries lending e-books. I
would do everything I could to encourage other writers and publishers (other
than my own) to pull their works from the lending libraries where I have my
works. I would support the efforts of my competitors to aggressively pursue
those who may have violated their copyrights (the few dollars I might lose to
piracy is just the cost of getting noticed).

E-books are fungible, and I would want my works in an environment where I am
more likely to be the substitute than the substituted.



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