Tolkien on the Kindle

[davem]

Well, poping back to this thread

I actually gave up on the Kindle LotR & as I was within a week of purchase I got it wiped by Amazon & a full refund. The typos proved too much in the end.

Actually glad I did, because Harper Collins, the publishers have now surpassed themselves - even for a company owned by Rupert Murdoch:

HarperCollins sets 26-checkout cap on its library e-books http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/harpe...brary-e-books/

The publisher also issued a short statement: "HarperCollins is committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come."

What presence? The presence that budget-crunched libraries can’t afford to purchase again once they’re loaned out 26 times? Great move, HC!

Of course, the idea is that printed books wear out after a certain number of lendings (30-35, says this librarian). And since the publishing industry never tires of thinking up ways to make e-books act more like print, this sort of thing probably should have been expected sooner or later. Needless to say, librarians and their partisans are upset, and a Twitter protest is going on under the hashtag #hcod.

It’s unclear whether, like agency pricing, this practice is going to spread to the other publishers. I wonder if any of them will realize just how bad this is making HarperCollins look. I mean, come on, libraries are having enough budget trouble already, and it’s not like you’re going to make a huge amount of money off of them in any case. And they expose people to your books who might decide they like them enough to buy them in another form. Do you really want to go this way, HarperCollins? Seriously?

So there we are, at a time when libraries in the UK are being shut down in their hundreds due to government spending cuts, Tolkien's publisher decides to cause a little more mischief, in a mean way. I no longer buy new physical editions of Tolkien books on principle, & I'll now make sure I avoid HC's ebooks - even if that means not getting e-copies at all.