Page:A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books.pdf/5

 digital rights (publisher or author?), and whether the rightsholder can be found (or is the work an orphan?). Attempting to clearly answer those questions on a title-by-title basis has proven costly, making full digital access for large numbers of works based on rightsholder permission difficult. Particularly for books and other published materials for which there was once an active market, libraries have not yet been able to provide broad full-text access online.

Many 20th Century books are not available for purchase as new copies in print or as digital versions online. Libraries would like to provide digital access, but many rightsholders have not offered those titles for sale in that format. The morass of rights management, combined with the orphan works problem and the ever-increasing copyright length, has made it complicated to see a path forward to broad digital access.

For modern libraries with users whose research and information use patterns mean they look to digital access first, this means that a whole world of research is effectively invisible to a variety of types of users. For some, the inability to physically travel to a library because of their remote physical location, economic wherewithal, or homebound limitations means that physical lending is not practical. For others, physical access is a matter of great inefficiency in their research and learning. For users with print disabilities—those who currently Page 5