The Briet Dilemma

We at RF have written favorably about the Briet Project before. Nathalie op de Beeck wrote about it today in Publishers Weekly, and it is good to see progress on it.

The author notes “With publishers and libraries at odds over e-book licensing’s long-term expense, hold times, and ethical concerns, a new platform called Briet is pursuing an open-access approach. Briet invites publishers to sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access.”

All good so far—ownership of titles and simultaneous access are great.

“Briet is still getting off the ground, but thousands of e-books are already available, the inventory is growing, and a toolkit is readily accessible for libraries and patrons to explore.”

Do check out the title list—lots of very interesting books, and a very useful collection for diversity featuring authors other than the usual best sellers.

“[Maria] Bustillos expects to make the platform available on Thorium Reader, using the latest iteration of Readium software, which powers the web-based e-book windows already familiar from the IA Open Library. In the finished version of Briet, Bustillos said, ‘we can offer LCP [licensed content protection] encryption to people that need and want it. Mind you, if librarians are interested now, we can put the tech pieces together and it’s ready for prime time, completely. You can come and buy books there’.”

RF Greatly admires Bustillos’ work and agrees with her points:

“It’s a real five-alarm fire for libraries,” Bustillos said, because the revolving door of e-book licensing makes collection development expensive and impermanent. “A lot of writers don’t realize that their digital books cannot be sold” due to DRM agreements, she continued. “If authors who love libraries and who became writers in libraries, like me, come to understand that there are commercial constraints on the availability of their digital books, we should all demand that this be in our contracts,” she said. Briet’s goal, she concluded, is to ensure that its inventory of e-books remains perpetually “ownable and archivable” by libraries.

So why, then, is the “dilemma” in our header? Once again, it is a question of patron access—specifically, how they access. Long experience has taught us that nearly all readers want one place to go to access their library ebooks. If there are multiple places, most tend to choose one favorite and go there, ignoring other options. That’s why Palace is so careful to be “the one app to rule them all.” It harvests content from many platforms. Even so, it’s a challenge to drive adoption. Readers—and, frankly, most library staff (and I’ve taught literally hundreds of them how to support digital library readers)—simply don’t want to learn something new and switch. Given the choice between what they already know that has the most popular content and a startup without it, I would bet a substantial sum that few will visit the new experience very often. Suddenly, the library is sinking money (even at VERY favorable costs—thanks very much, Briet!) into a collection that seldom gets hits.

Please, pretty please, with a bow around it and a side of sugar, find some way to make what we might buy accessible in one of our apps—preferably the non-profit Palace, but any of them. Thorium is an EPUB reader. Are these EPUB files? There is certainly a technical solution. These would be great additions to our other collections. Separate from the others ebooks in our collections, I worry they will languish unread. Most digital readers launch from our apps, not the library catalog. Let us put the content where most readers will find it.

There would be anther advantage. Suppose the Big Publishers decide to pull out of states that pass reasonable ebook laws. It could happen. Fine. We use this content, integrated with what we get from Indie publishers, drive readers to it, tout it, create exposure and demand for it, while we tell library readers and legislators from village to federal government how the big guys seem to think public funds are troughs for them to feed at, gobbling up at a rate far higher for digital than print, ripping off the public and unfairly restricting reading. We offer much new interesting content while we—by law—withhold funds from unfair contracts and advocate for change. It would give libraries a stronger hand while we hold out for necessary and fair change. And we can use all the help we can get in any upcoming difficulties.

In the meantime, RF encourages experimenting with Briet. If you are a library that could drive lots of use to these ebooks, go for it! Many of us will perforce wait until these wonderful titles aren’t separate from the rest of our collection.