How can we make electronic lending better for libraries?

[terriko]

I got an audiobook to play on my MP3 player today, and it was a chore and a half with around 5 hours worth of upgrades. I could write a post about the procedure, but that's been done.

Brad Colbow's comic pretty much sums up the DRM problem best, I think. Getting DRM-protected content sucks, but libraries often have such systems in place to allow lending. I hate DRM, but I like my library, and I really like the idea of libraries being able to lend electronic content in a way that makes sense.

What I want to know is "what we are doing about it?" I know plenty of folk interested in open technology/culture... do any of you know of alternative software available to libraries? Resources they could use that would be more awesome and still enable lending?

(Related reading: Across the Digital Divide talks about why the whole "print is dead" thing leaves a lot of people in the dust. If you think about it in that context, making it easier to lend electronic resources in the future could be a bigger deal than you'd think.)

Usually I see people recommend you donate to the EFF or somesuch. And that's a good idea in general, but... I mean, I know I'd like to just have a world that was DRM-free. But apparently this is not a solution that works for my library, or more to the point it's not a solution that works for the places where my library obtains content. I want DRM to be dead, but I also would like to be able to borrow electronic resources a little sooner than never, thanks. Surely there are folk out there who are willing to sideline the ideology for now and just try to make something that's actually good?

So... what *are* we doing to make it easier for libraries to lend us electronic stuff?

Comments

[heliumbreath]

In the immediate term, I'm still reading paper. In the longer term, we may see some combination of people finally bashing their heads against it a time too many and it being thrown out, or it may finally get sorted out to work reliably (I'd bet the least amount of money on that possibility), or platform fragmentation between assorted tablets and e-book readers and phones and desktop environments will make it impossible for a non-open format to be portable enough, or maybe Mac will displace Windows as the dominant monoculture, replacing Just Broken with Just Works. But then there's the question of why physical local libraries would survive a transition away from physical media at all.

[terriko]

I don't really care about your personal solution; I'm more looking for something that I could take to the library and say "Hey, this might be better for you than OverDrive." You know, the way open source folk suggest Moodle to universities using Blackboard/WebCT?

My local library serves an area that is relatively poor. I'm guessing that they're providing electronic resources because it's a way to enhance their catalog at a relatively minimal cost, or they probably wouldn't be doing it. At the very least, electronic resources can't be lost or damaged so they save some there. So far, I've noticed that they had older books/audiobooks available electronically that they don't have in the libraries themselves, which is very convenient if you're trying to catch up on a series that the library hasn't been buying since the beginning. It's likely not an issue of transitioning away entirely, but in supplementing the collection.

[robbat2]

From my present consulting with libraries, Overdrive is NOT cheap, but where electronic reserves do excel is that they take no physical storage space, and can scale for lots of simultaneous copies (Overdrive has specific optional programs for this).

I know of no present open-source option to replace OverDrive. The problem is more publisher buy-in than Overdrive's broken software. The publishers keep demanding DRM lockdowns.

[heliumbreath]

L. (who works in library automation) tells me that NetLibrary is the other major DRM lending scheme, but it's at least as problematic as OverDrive. Some libraries will loan out readers/players with content set up by library staff, so at least save you faffing with oddball schemes when you don't have the precise hardware and software the scheme assumes.

I can't offer you a DRM scheme that works nicely, especially as I believe there's no such thing.

The content creators own the content (I remember Linus saying, approximately, "Linux is free because I gave it to you, not because you had any right to take it"), so it's up to them to set terms. They can give it away for free, lock it up and sit on it, distribute unlocked copies on the honor system, use schemes like OverDrive, or for that matter invent a new DRM scheme where I have to moon my webcam as biometric authentication. All we can do is say "Yes" and accept their offering or "No" and walk away.

And I see a great need for the community to tell them that their content is not compelling enough for us to jump through DRM hoops to get at it. Maybe that will eventually nudge them toward the honor system. It's a mess with no easy solutions.

[thorfinn]

Having recently (the last few months) started working in application support for a University Library ... Actually Librarians are still scarily good at information technology. They are, after all, the first information technologists. "Ask a Librarian" is often better than trying to use search tech, including search engines. This includes finding digital material as well as physical stuff. :-)

Until this contract, in my nearly twenty years of doing tech stuff professionally, I've *never* had the experience of having the Business Customer being the one to supply me with the correct and relevant vendor support documentation for an issue they're having, or something they're thinking about in relation to the application suite. Now I have, repeatedly. That's Librarians.

[terriko]

Yeah, my appreciation for librarians is part of why I'm guessing that OverDrive may be the only player in this game, because surely they'd have chosen something better if it were available.

[thorfinn]

As far as I'm aware, the core issue here is with the copyright holders. The vast majority of them won't accept a non-DRM solution, and as far as I'm aware, there's no open-source DRM solutions.

There's a fundamental problem with digital data and DRM that never goes away - if you can view the thing, you can (and must have) copied it into an unencrypted form at some point. So if you have an open-source DRM solution, most probably someone can clone your DRM solution, pretend to be doing DRM properly, then in fact just copy the content at whatever point it becomes unprotected so you can view it.

It's a difficult problem - on the one hand, content creators should be rewarded, on the other hand, digital copies of content are trivial to produce to the point of basically being almost free to store and transmit... and all our rules about copyright are based on the physical world where copies are hard to produce.

This pretty much causes all the broken when it comes to the rules around copyright. :-/

Possibly more on topic to your actual question, but unfortunately not actually open source products:

• EZProxy? It's not really a lending solution, more of an authenticated proxied-access solution, but maybe of interest?
  
• Kindle Library Lending ?
  

what is left?

[kevix.myopenid.com]

well if you want to keep the DRM and have it useable for Gnu folks, the only think I can think of is for the Overdrive folks to make a non-free binary-only Gnu Client. I'm guessing Canonical would the most obvious to ask for this concession. That would seem te cheapest. Media folks like to do deals, look at the Amazon Kindle fire, that had to lots of 'big media' deals to get that setup. I'm assuming Authors/Publisher want deal with some big name and use DRM because they work with the assumption that everyone is a criminal and will not pay to support a library. You could also get copylefted/PD ebooks/audiobook. Maybe Lulu or similar would be more willing?

Re: what is left?

[terriko]

Let me tell you about my problems with Overdrive this time.

I have three digital devices that could, in theory play the audiobook:
1. My mac laptop
2. My android phone
3. My creative mp3 player

The audiobook is in WMA format. So while I can install the overdrive software on #1 and 2, it absolutely refused to download the book on the assertion that I could not play the files.

That... pretty much would have meant that a binary blob for linux wouldn't have solved my particular usability issue at all. And it's the outright usability problem (as described in the comic) that I'm most interested in solving.

It's most definitely going to "need" a binary blob to deal with the DRM, but it should not "need" me to upgrade to ie8 because some activex control I need to download an updated certificate because their bloody process forced me to upgrade media player after I'd tried to view the content in it... Why isn't all the DRM in the blob? Why are audiobooks even in WMA format, which has got to be one of the most useless things?

Re: what is left?

[terriko]

(I should mention that my other devices are currently in transit, and I'm not counting my work devices. And that the licensing allows me to burn the audiobook to CD, so it's not like they're really being careful about keeping the DRM... if you can burn it to CD, why can't I just play the darned thing on my phone? Oh well, at least I *have* a windows VM for this kind of nonsense.)

[(Anonymous)]

"Lending" isn't one of the available operations for digital content, so there's no way to "enable lending." One can only make or destroy a copy.

The closest approximation of "lending" would be for the library to loan you a reader/player device when they loan you the digital materials. In this case you never receive a copy of the digital materials at all--they live inside the device you borrowed from the library, which remains at all times owned by the library. This approach deals fairly with all the ownership-vs-control (the library owns the device, so the library gets to control it) and software compatibility issues (the library pre-installs working software, and you agree not to change it) of DRM. This approach even takes a stab at the digital divide issues, though it probably won't make much of a dent until ebook readers are cheap and plentiful to the same degree as the PADD devices littering meeting room tables in Star Trek. There are some problems, though. People could hack the devices to spy on later patrons. The devices would have to omit abusable features like GPS, cameras, or microphones. They'd have to be disposed of a responsible manner when they reached the end of their service lives.

The second-closest approximation of "lending" would be for patrons to agree to destroy their copy (or more likely the key to an encrypted copy) after a particular date. Arguably it should be trivial to write open-source software that automates such agreements if there was a way to codify them (and that should be about as hard to do as the browser certificate verification in HTTPS). The problem is that software can be modified to not honor such agreements, so the DRM market is full of people competing to make software modifications as difficult as possible in practice using every technical trick the law doesn't disallow (check out bruiser (http://i.imgur.com/LN92O.png) to get an idea of what DRM marketing looks like). Should we play this game, and would anyone care if we did?

We could implement The IEEE P1817 Standard for Consumer-ownable Digital Personal Property (http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1817/index.html), assuming they get anywhere near to publishing a standards document. To me, it looks like none of the interested groups would buy into it: there's no incentive for people who already own big centralized DRM systems to change, there's not enough in the system for publishers (in addition to making copies harder, publishers also want usage data that comes out of centralized DRM schemes) and there's too much risk for patrons (who get no new capabilities relative to stuff that isn't encumbered by DRM, but do get the risk of people being able to literally steal electronic copies of their documents instead of merely keeping copies of them without authorization). It might also depend on every device having Internet access to work. Still, if we have to implement any DRM scheme, this is by far the least offensive.

very belated reply

[brainwane]

My spouse is now working on Library Simplified, which aims to make it way easier for people to check out ebooks on mobile devices via public libraries.