Notes
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Summary: \"This essay then explains how e-lending services often privilege commercial interests over the needs of libraries and patrons, leading to ethical and legal tensions. Specifically, e-lending services raise issues of privacy, exploitative labor, economic domination, collection censorship, universal access, and critical thinking. This essay concludes with preliminary recommendations for minimizing the commercialism in e-lending and proposes areas for future research.\" (97-98)
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Notes:
\nThis piece is, in a way, a very long literature review.
\nLibraries are moving toward digital systems. More and more content is being shared through e-devices. They site studies from libraries that talk about their e-lending services: \"Several librarians in libraries of all types have published case studies describing e-reader lending services created to fit their local situations (e.g., Behler & Lush, 2011; Clark, 2009; Hayman, Bertrand, & Rose, 2011; Jonker, 2012; Mallett, 2010; Savova & Garsia, 2012)\" (98).
\nThis essay is critical of blindly moving towards e-lending without considering the corporate interests involved. On page 99, Widdersheim discusses the role of capital interest in the e-book sector. A key quote: \"With the seeming exception of the school library e-book market, e-book industries in libraries suggest monopolistic trends\" (99).
\nThe move towards digital libraries makes sense, given that they take up relatively little space (100).
\nAnother Passage (Bold is mine):
\n\"The paradox of the digital information “revolution” is that information is monetized and restricted now more than ever. Libraries that could conceivably provide information access in unprecedented ways face underfunding, and the digital media that promise new affordances also increasingly require information that is commoditized and monetized. Monopolistic trends in the information economy threaten the mission of libraries to provide free services to the public. Through the Internet and the World Wide Web, information can be distributed and produced rapidly, cheaply, and in great volumes, but industries have also capitalized on opportunities to monetize information in unprecedented ways (McChesney, 2013)\" (100)
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DRM's might lead to privacy concerns. Some libraries use a distribution strategy that requires users to log into an amazon account in order to gain access to e-content (This program is called Overdrive). Widdersheim suggests that OverDrive presents a number of problems:
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1. The libraries do not own the books. If OverDrive would simply stop the service, the money that the library had paid for it would be essentially gone. (105)
\n2. The library is bound to the service. They cannot simply get up and join another service. This leads to continuous payment to one company. (105) [This appears antithetical to free information]
\nExcerpt (this is really the most important thing to our project):
\n\"Today, commercial entities transform information from a nonexclusive, public, non-rivalrous good to an exclusive good and restrict its distribution using DRM, copyright law, and contract law. These technologies of control create information scarcity. Indeed, e-books and other technologies utilized in e-lending represent “closed, proprietary systems devised to establish and maintain artificial scarcity, so as to give immense power to private monopolies” (McChesney, 2013, p. 127). Like the Internet, e-lending technologies have been “commercialized,
copyrighted, patented, privatized, data-inspected, and monopolized; scarcity has been created” (McChesney, 2013, p. 218). Due to the commercial nature of many e-lending technologies, libraries have few options in how they provide their services.\" (105-106)
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Further Sources that might be of interest:
\nMcChesney, R. W. (2013). Digital disconnect: How capitalism is turning the Internet against democracy. New York, NY: New Press.
\nMosco, V. (1989). The pay-per society: Computers and communication in the Information Age. Toronto, Canada: Ablex.
\n\n
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Definitions
\n(From wikipedia, unless otherwise stated)
\nDigital rights management (DRM) is a class of copy protection technologies[1] that are used by hardware and software manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders, and individuals with the intent to control the use of digital content and devices after sale;
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