The leaders of the American Library Association (ALA) will meet at the end of this month with top executives from Macmillan, Simon & Schuster (S&S), and Penguin publishing houses, which all do not allow libraries to circulate their ebooks (in Penguin’s case the prohibition is on new releases only).
“We asked for it and we got both the CEOs of Macmillan and S&S to be at our meetings along with a number of senior staff of these companies,” said Molly Raphael, the president of ALA. “I think they are at least interested in having some kind of dialogue, but I don’t know what it means. We’ll find out more when we go,” she said.
The meetings will occur January 30, 31, and February 1 in New York City, according to Keith Fiels, ALA’s executive director who also will attend.“I want to assure you that the dialog will begin with us saying ‘you need to deal with libraries and you need to do this as soon as possible,’ then we can have a dialog starting from there,” Fiels said. “I think for the membership, this is what’s keeping people awake at night,” he said.
Alan Inouye, the director of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy, and Maureen Sullivan, ALA’s 2012-13 president, will also attend.
The news came at a meeting Saturday evening of ALA’s Working Group on Digital Content and Libraries at the Midwinter Meeting in Dallas. Raphael appointed the group in the fall 2011.
Fiel’s message about the importance of ebook lending to ALA’s membership was reinforced by Sari Feldman, the executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Ohio and a co-chair of the working group.
“As a public librarian whose entire bread and butter is first-run, new, hot stuff, if we lose that we will have to completely reinvent ourselves,” Feldman said.
Fiels, Raphael, and Inouye had previously met in New York this past September with Tom Allen, the president of the Association of American Publishers as well as the library marketing people from many publishers, and the upcoming meetings are an extension of that effort.
“We feel we need to move some dialog with these publishers forward,” Raphael said. “We also want to understand a little bit more from the publishers’ point of view,” she said.
Full report at Library Journal.