Bollocks, basically: The Sieghart Report on UK libraries and ebook lending

Last year the UK Culture minister commissioned a panel of library and publishing industry representatives to investigate e-lending by public libraries in England and to make some recommendations.

The panel was chaired by philanthropist, entrepreneur and publisher William Sieghart, and their rather slim and insubstantial report was published this week.

The key recommendations were:

·       A number of pilots in 2013 using established literary events should be set up to test business models and user behaviours, and provide a transparent evidence base: all major publishers and aggregators should participate in these pilots.

·       Public libraries should offer both on-site and remote E-Lending service to their users, free at point of use.

·       The interests of publishers and booksellers must be protected by building in frictions that set 21st-century versions of the limits to supply which are inherent in the physical loans market (and where possible, opportunities for purchase should be encouraged).  These frictions include the lending of each digital copy to one reader at a time, that digital books could be securely removed after lending and that digital books would deteriorate after a number of loans.  The exact nature of these frictions should evolve over time to accommodate changes in technology and the market.

Frankly, this is staggeringly lame. Its main thrust is to ensure the publishing industry remains unshaken and unstirred by the emerging e-lending practices of libraries. It is profoundly protectionist and conservative. .

I can't imagine this report will garner any respect in the wider library community. It's bollocks, basically.

Firstly, it doesn't intellectually grapple with the arguments at all. It blithely assumes that 'friction' is necessary or the whole publishing industry will collapse.

It recommends pilots be set up, and, incredibly, 'all major publishers and aggregators should participate..' Why? The business is happening. Librarians know what's happening. Publishers know what's happening. And if no credible data is being collected in the UK, well, no need to panic. There's plenty of quantitative stuff (Pew, mainly) being collected in the US. There's nothing so strange about the English, surely, that they need to reinvent the wheel.

As for the recommendation to emulate analogue 'frictions' in the e-lending world, this is a highly contentious issue that should not be simply accepted as a starting point. Perhaps such contrivance is not really necessary? We'll never know from reports like this one.

A far better and more productive, but no doubt vulgar, way to proceed would be to just let market forces prevail. Why not let the publishers and librarians fight it out between them, and allow industry norms to develop as they eventually will. The more courageous and progressive publishers will blaze the trail and the dead-headed rest will eventually follow.

There's no 'role for government' here. But our UK colleagues love this sort of stuff. Remember the Net Book Agreement?