Page:A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books.pdf/32

 For print-only books, the potential e-book market has been available for nearly 20 years. Publishers have by and large not exploited that market, for various reasons. Libraries and readers have been waiting, but at this point it cannot be said to be a “reasonable, or likely to be developed” market. Publishers have largely not even maintained a print market presence, allowing books to devolve to out-of-print status quickly. Several studies have suggested that copyright may reduce the availability of books generally.

So, for books published in this time period as a whole, there is a strong argument that they collectively represent a market failure. Part of that failure is due to high costs of determining commercial availability for any given work. The costs of searching and identifying which works are out of print, orphaned, or not available in e-book format is costly itself. However, we believe that there is sufficient data for assessment of commercial availability that can be leveraged for CDL to maximize the case that these particular titles within this 20th century focus are unavailable either in print or electronically. Those, we believe, present the very best case for CDL uses.

IV.

Libraries thinking about CDL will encounter risk, both positive and negative. On the positive side, we believe there is a significant upside: CDL helps libraries fulfill their missions in the broadest sense, using technology to increase effective, non-discriminatory access to collections for our users, and the world. Libraries have faced existential challenges for decades—“Is the library dead?”—but have survived in part because of their responsiveness to new technology. As new generations of information consumers expect immediate digital access to collections—along with those who have always needed but not been given digital access—libraries that fail to make their substantial collections available face anew the risk of becoming irrelevant or at least minimally effective in users’ eyes. How can we help those users find and use the millions of volumes of the past century Page 32