There is no need to reinvent the wheel.

TPL (The Public Library) already got upgraded to TPB.

Serves exact same purpose, significantly higher efficiency.

Well, it doesn’t offer after school bratsitting.. but noone really wanted your brats screaming in their library every day after school anyways…

“Finally, innovative markets like the one developed by Gluejar allow libraries (and others) to acquire the digital rights of commercial works and set them free.”

And how is this better than letting those works simply enter the public domain after 28 years? I understand that Van de Velde is trying to find options within the constraints of current copyright law, but it still seems unnecessarily restrictive…

It’s better because it is, at the moment, possible.

Believe me, I’m sympathetic to the problems of copyright maximalism, and I’d love to see copyright laws more in line with the balanced approach reflected in the Constitution — limited terms that protect the interest of both past and future creators by incentivizing both creation and reuse. And it isn’t mutually exclusive — we can work to create new markets for creative works *and also* advocate for saner copyright law. But from where I sit, we’re going to be able to get those new markets up and running a whole lot sooner than we’re going to be able to get Congress on board with radical legal changes.

Much sooner, in fact: unglue.it launches May 17.

–Andromeda, the unglue.it librarian

My apologies if I came off a bit rough. I was trying to emphasize how far copyright has expanded in our lifetimes, not to demean Gluejar and its efforts. If, as a child, I’d been told the future of copyright, I’d not have believed it.

I realize that a number of people are trying to find practical solutions, and I certainly hope that unglue.it helps to make many more works publicly accessible.

As I witnessed in my corporate library life there are two distinct camps of library patrons .. those who want books, (peer-reviewed, accredited and approved, usually hard-copy resources), and those who want everything available online. The librarian’s big quandary over the past twenty years, is how to merge the two. In our technical library, it was important to provide accurate, well-researched information. That takes time. Therefore, in most cases, the speed of technology meant that those books were obsolete before they were through the publishing process. This lead to many, non-specialist, libraries having to choose between tech books that needed replacing each year, vs. more liberal-arts-type materials that might have a longer shelf-life.

The The American Libraries Association (ALA) is very politically active in the free-speech arena, and librarians have been dealing with copyright laws for generations. This latest generation’s information shift is less about formats and more about how information is constructed. Some authors and research institutions still prefer the old-fashioned research model. Much like some people prefer the old record album format, finding value in the artistry of the whole. Others prefer their information, like their music, one tidbit at a time available for individual purchase. As you know, laws have not been able to keep up with this shift, yet libraries are required to cater to both types of customers.

Good library systems and good librarians are very clever with limited resources. Budgets are being cut all over while prices are going up. A public library system has patrons that need school books, want romance novels, need a book on how to repair a leaky roof, and/or they need computer time to type resumes, learn a language or communicate with family overseas. Public librarians are required to be pleasant, knowledgeable, efficient, child-friendly, computer experts on a public-servant’s salary. The good ones are all of that and more. Above all, they take great care to make their library a physical place for the disenfranchised to come and try to improve their lives through knowledge.

Another librarian here. This is all very much true in public libraries as well. Certainly, it would help libraries immensely to provide more and better and faster access to their materials, so long as the user population of that library can obtain that access. After all, in a location where home internet access is less common, a library with internet terminals becomes a point of access–but note that users are still coming to the building to make use of this service. Bear that in mind. And bear in mind that all libraries and their populations and those populations’ needs are different–especially in public libraries.

What this article has also omitted is the significance of “library as place,” a concept that has become more and more popular in library studies and literature. Some argue that it’s a last gasp from traditional libraries trying to maintain relevance in the face of change, but in certain settings (college campuses, public libraries), the idea of a library not just as a repository of books but a location for books, reading, meetings, socialization, collaboration, and access (online and otherwise) has been surprisingly successful. No surprise, really, if the library resembles an online situation in the meat world. More than that, there are yet library users who do prefer the building and the physical aspect of reading a book. So, as the poster above noted, there’s more than one (more than two or three or four) kind of library user. And libraries are doing as best they can to adapt and provide services for all these users. All at the same time. And this is a detail of library services not addressed by assertions that libraries just need to go digital.

On a different track entirely, this discussion hasn’t addressed the problems associated with archives and historic documents (and other materials). Even if these materials are digitized there will always need a location in which they can be stored, protected, and referenced (even if they aren’t out-and-out used). So as much as one might dream of an all-digital library or an “unwalled” library, there are other situations not addressed by these ideas. I absolutely support greater digitization and open access, but spare a thought for the physical infrastructure where it is most needed.

Since when getting rid of restrictive distribution regulations socialist?

Now tax dollars paying for servers and bandwidth so others can get the latest lady gaga album or tom clancy novel for no cost would be, but that’s not what you said.

If that is true, the librarian pay scale is in need of review and revision.

Thank you for your support of local libraries!

FYI, Gluejar’s platform, Unglue.it, launched yesterday.