Recent events have convinced me that I need to formally announce a policy on answering questions from bloggers and journalists.
Yes, I answer media queries either as an expert or on background details. If you are working on a story, send me an email and ask. I may not have time to help you but I won’t just ignore your email (you’d be surprised how often that happens to me).
image by e-magic
Have you ever had one of those moments where you kinda sorta agree with someone’s conclusion and yet still disagree with many of the assumptions that lead to the conclusion?
That’s how I feel towards a piece published in The Bookseller earlier today.
Simon Rowberry argues that ebooks aren’t dead, but his arguments betray legacy industry biases. For example, he cavalierly tosses off the assumption that $10 ebook prices are unsustainable.
The fall in revenue from ebooks is a direct consequence of legacy publishers’ prioritization of print sales at the expense of digital books. The Kindle’s North American launch in 2007 marketed new ebook titles at $9.99, a discount of at least $10 on the hardback equivalent. This approach was unsustainable, but it set readers’ expectations for the cost of ebooks.
What’s funny about this assumption are the many indie authors who would disagree, or the publishers like Baen Books that price all of their ebooks under $10.
Baen Books has been selling its ebooks at what Rowberry would describe as an unsustainable price for close to twenty years, and yet they have somehow managed to pull it off.
And that’s not the only data that Rowberry didn’t include. A little earlier in the piece he cites stats from the UK PA and then vaguely hand waves at reasons why the data is incomplete:
But despite the early promise of the ebook, many are questioning whether it has lived up to these expectations. In recent years, the ebook has faced significant backlash amid reports of declining sales in trade publishing. The Publishing Association Yearbook 2016 noted a 17% slump in the sale of consumer ebooks while physical book revenue increased by 8%. Over the last couple of years, audiobooks have replaced ebooks as digital publishing’s critical darling on the back of a rapid increase in revenue. In this climate, several commentators have asked “how ebooks lost their shine.”
…
The ‘ebook plateau’ argument also ignores emergent sectors of digital-only sales, including self-publishing, where new genres drive a vibrant and divergent market. Amazon facilitates most self-publishing sales, and the company steadfastly refuses to provide sales data for books published exclusively on the Kindle. So a potential increase in sales for emergent digital-only genres is hidden by the headlines about traditional publishers.
Yeah, the data is only obscured if you refuse to go looking for it.
I am referring of course the Author Earnings Report and the pseudonymous Data Guy (who does answer press queries about the latest data).
We know exactly the limits of the stats from the PA (it misses 38% of the UK ebook market), and that is the point that Rowberry should have made.
But that would involve looking beyond the legacy industry. Unfortunately, Rowberry gives the dying part of the traditional publishing industry more credence than it deserves.
He actually think the legacy industry could kill off ebooks:
For the moment, reports of the ebook’s death are exaggerated. If the disinterest of Amazon and resistance from the book trade continue, however, there is a chance that the ebook is killed off – in my view, prematurely.
While an industry can refuse to supply the market with what the market wants, that industry cannot kill that want.
And in the case of digital goods, it cannot prevent consumers from adopting the digital goods – they’ll just turn to someone else to supply the content.
Remember, for the longest time Rowling would not allow Harry Potter ebooks, so people who wanted a Harry Potter ebook simply downloaded a pirated copy.
And need I spell out the early history of the digital music market (back before the iPod, when record labels refused to sell in said market)?
This is the single biggest flaw in Rowberry’s piece, and it betrays a viewpoint shared by a lot of people in the legacy industry. So many have forgotten that consumers get to decide whether a product, idea, or service succeeds or fails.
The most that an industry can do is to provide what the market wants. If it can’t or won’t then it will be supplanted by another industry that will.
In the case of book publishing, the legacy industry is being replaced by those who will supply either the (fiction) ebooks consumers want, or the (nonfiction) videos and other content that people are using to learn.
Digital isn’t dying – the industry is. (And yes, there is data to back up that claim.)
image via ABC News
News is by definition the reporting of recent events, but sometimes it is equally important to note when an event does not occur.
On Sunday, the voting period for the 2017 Hugo Awards ended. According to the announcement, a total of 3,319 votes were cast (compared to 3130, 5950, 3587, and 1850 in the past four years).
You can see the list of candidates on the Hugo Award website. What you won’t find is any sign of the influence of the Sad Puppies. According to author Sarah Hoyt, the organizer of this year’s Sad Puppies, that’s because there was no slate this year.
Starting in 2013, the Sad Puppies (and its Rabid Puppies offshoot), were either a concerted attempt to introduce a right-wing slate, a regressive slate, an indie slate to the Hugo Awards, or, an attempt to wrest control of the Hugo Awards from an insider clique, prove there was a clique in control of the Hugos, or simply to sow chaos. (The descriptions varied depending on who you asked, the year, and how much they had had to drink).
This year, however, there was no coordinated Sad Puppies campaign. As Hoyt explained in June on her blog and on the Mad Genius Club blog, that was by design.
From Mad Genius Club:
If we’d planned to do something different this year, I’d have passed it on to Amanda early. But since what we’re planning has no defined deadline, as soon as we get it up (eh) in the next couple of months, we’ll be fine. And we want to make sure we do it right.
So, originally, we’d planned to do nothing, and let Sad Puppies ride into the sunset with Kate’s campaign, which did everything the left claimed to want and yet was still subjected to the same complaints as ever.
But the problem with a decentralized, almost leaderless campaign is that it’s prone to be high jacked, and we realized late last year that if someone didn’t announce then someone who was wholly (really) in the rabid camp was going to take it, and make it sound like the campaigns were always one.
Hoyt went into greater detail on her blog;
THE POINT of the fight for the Sad Puppies was never to get the Hugos, to conquer the Hugos or to hold the Hugos in perpetuity. It was simply to show that the fight was rigged and in the possession of a small clique.
THIS was amply proven by Larry and Brad, and if more was needed, Kate did a double reverse maneuver and actually proved that even if you did EVERYTHING they wanted you to do from open nomination, to more than the slots per category, to actually attending conventions and being very very nice, they would still attack you if you weren’t one of the club.
So if you were wondering about the status of the Sad Puppies, the official word is that they have accomplished their goal and retired from the field.
image by Jeff Kontur
Here’s some news that will keep Potter fandom on the edge of their sat until September: I’ve just heard that a new enhanced Harry Potter ebook will be released on 5 September.
The first enhanced Harry Potter ebooks were released for iBooks in late 2015, but the new one is being developed for Amazon’s Kindle in Motion, and will feature animated goblins, moving covers, and more:
Other highlights from the moving book will include a multi-page spread of the lively Diagon Alley, an animated portrait of Draco Malfoy and a handy guide to trolls.
As well as moving images, readers can still tailor their reading experience, adjusting font sizes with the newly sized words magically reflowing around the animation and images, and, if they choose, toggle the animations off or on.
This ebook is going to be the 22nd title to be released in the Kindle in Motion format, Amazon’s second go at an enhanced Kindle ebook. Launched last year, KiM features full page animations, moving covers, and page backgrounds that don’t interfere with changing the text size (a defect found in fixed-layout ebooks).
So far Pottermore has only announced Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the new edition, but they may add more titles in the future. This ebook will be released on 5 September. You can pre-order it, and see more details, on Amazon UK and Amazon US.
And when it is released, you can enjoy the enhancements in the Kindle apps for Android and iOS, or on your Fire tablet.
When Google shut down Reader four years ago, they made it clear that they wanted to replace self-directed reading choices with an app that algorithmically choose what a user should read next.
At the time Google called that app Google Now, but the latest iteration is simply called "the feed", and Google says it got a major update this week.
The Verge’s Casey Newton reports that the feed showed up in their account this week, and they weren’t impressed.
Google today is rolling out its take on the news feed, a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other content. The feed will appear in its flagship app for Android and iOS, simply called Google. The feed, which includes items drawn from your search history and topics you choose to follow, is designed to turn Google’s app into a destination for browsing as well as search. Google is hoping you’ll begin opening its app the way you do Facebook or Twitter, checking it reflexively throughout the day for quick hits of news and information.
…
The Google feed came to my account Tuesday afternoon, and I spent a long while scrolling through it. The feed offered up articles on several of my interests: Netflix, Instagram, Game of Thrones, and the video game I’m currently playing (and have watched a bunch of YouTube videos about). The best topic I saw in the feed was “fake news,” and featured an article from Lifehacker on how to spot it.
Scroll far enough and you’ll get a basic, ambient sense of the day’s news. But few of the items I saw compelled me to read the article. Part of what makes Facebook and Twitter’s feeds compelling is the social endorsement that links there carry: you read because your friends tell you to, and you trust your friends. They also give you commentary and analysis around what you’re reading. In short, they feel lively — and the Google feed can feel stale by comparison.
You can read more about the feed in Google’s blog post.
You can find the feed itself in the Google apps for Android and iOS; all I had to do was simply open the app and I was prompted to activate the feed.
I have not.
Google won’t activate the feed so long as I block them from tracking me, and since I will never change that setting I will never be able to use "the feed".
That’s no big loss; I have a dozen other ways to sift for important stories, including Twitter, Search Alerts, the couple thousand RSS feeds I follow, mailing lists, etc.
Google’s "the feed" is just one more competitor for our limited attention, and it’s not even a very good one. I mean, they’ve been working on this in one form or another for at least four years, and the best they could come up with earned a "meh" response.
You would think Google, with all of its servers, could do better, don’t you?
We all know that authors have been using Wattpad to refine their work before officially publishing it in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. This has been going on since at least 2011.
Not all authors want to take that last step of going into business for themselves, however, which is why Wattpad has been announcing partnerships with trade publishers.
Today Wattpad announced a partnership with one of Hachette Livre’s French imprints.
The partnership, which is the latest under the Wattpad Studios umbrella, represents the most extensive partnership between Wattpad and a European publisher. Three Wattpad stories have already been selected for publication in the French language as part of the partnership: Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Mr. Popular and I, and She’s With Me.
Following the launch of Wattpad Studios last year, Wattpad has been working closely with publishers and entertainment companies to co-produce stories for print, TV, film, and digital.
Wattpad has no claim on the works created by its 55 million members, but it does have reading stats on each story and it is now using that info to identify popular stories that have yet to be published as ebooks.
Wattpad Studios exists to connect writers with the companies that want to publish a work, with Wattpad getting a cut.
Given what we know about Hollywood contracts and the standard contract terms offered by traditional publishing, I’m sure you can see why I chose the title. (Okay, "indentured servitude" would be more accurate, but it’s not as catchy.)
Here’s an infographic that needs the attention of the well-read.
GE Editing has assembled a list what it says are the mot iconic book set in each country of the world.
We include epic poetry like Pan Tadeusz from Poland, international best sellers like The Three Musketeers set in France, and books recently translated into English for the very first time like the Iraqi classic The Long Way Back. You will find books from favorite authors like Margaret Atwood and Anthony Burgess and discover vibrant new voices like Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz.
Not having visited these countries or read all of the books, I can’t comment on whether the books are well-matched to each country.
What do you think?
Amazon announced on Saturday that the June 2017 funding pool for Kindle Unlimited was $18 million. This was an increase of $100,000 from May 2017, continuing the gradual growth trend we’ve been seeing since the beginning of the year.
At the same time, data collected by Self-Publisher Bibel shows that the per-page rate dipped several hundredths of a cent in most markets.
P.S. Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.
image by jeffbr13
Last November Bookbaby conducted a survey which polled authors on everything from what genres they are publishing to how they’re promoting their books.
I just got an email today with the news that Bookbaby had released the results of the survey. I have not had a chance to read the survey, but i see from the forward that 7,677 people, including 4,600 published authors, answered the 56 question survey.
The survey report covers:
You can get a copy of the survey results from Bookbaby in exchange for your contact details (they want to come harvest your organs later, if that is okay).
In related news, Bookbaby also has a author conference coming up in November.
If you visited this blog on the afternoon of 12 July, you may have been bothered by a nag-screen loading emblem and message about net neutrality.
What you’re seeing is the result of a plugin I installed to use today, the net neutrality protest day (I will disable the plugin in a few more hours). I belatedly joined the protest after reading comments on Twitter that completely missed the point.
This is a lie. We already have "paid prioritization". It's called "CDNs". And the Internet wouldn't work without them. https://t.co/zrpgK7aSQP
— Rob??? Graham ? (@ErrataRob) July 12, 2017
Rob is trying to confuse the issue by arguing that since the net lacks equality it obviously also lacks neutrality. He’s conflating two different and unrelated issues here; to put it simply, net equality has nothing to do with net neutrality.
As Rob points out, the net is inherently unequal because some companies can afford to hire better engineers, pay for faster servers, and otherwise invest in hardware.
The net is inherently unequal, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still argue for net neutrality.
What we are protesting today are companies (mainly ISPs) that want to choose which content gets priority.
This issue is at least seven years old, and when it first came up the focus was on companies wanting to be paid twice for delivering the same data once.
The same story cropped up again every couple years (until Obama’s FCC passed the net neutrality rules that Trump’s FCC wants to remove). If it was not Verizon and Google, it was Netflix and Verizon, or Google and Orange. The ISPs were already being paid once by their customers for the data the customers request, and those companies wanted to be paid a second time by the websites that are sending the data.
But in 2017 it is clear that this isn’t just about Verizon getting greedy.
It’s about the ISPs deciding who gets to have a voice.
If the ISPs can decide which website gets priority then it follows that they can also decide who doesn’t get heard.
It will be Comcast interfering with BitTorrent traffic all over again, only this time around Comcast won’t be blocking downloads. Instead they will be keeping you from hearing about government protests, or whichever side of an issue it doesn’t like.
And that affects everyone.
The day of protest is mostly over with, but if you would still like participate it is not too late. The EFF has a form you can use to send a comment to the FCC, protesting its plans to end net neutrality.
When news broke this week that O’Reilly Media was closing its ebookstore in favor of Safari Books Online and distributing to retailers like the Kindle Store, customers, fans, and supporters reacted with dismay, anger, and outrage.
Some saw it as a betrayal of everything Tim O’Reilly said he stood for, while others were understandably angry that they could no longer buy their preferred format, PDF (and no, the version in Google Play is not a suitable replacement).
O’Reilly Media had broken the first rule of sharing bad news, leaving them to scramble after the fact to conduct damage control.
They tried to put out the fires when they posted an explanation on Friday, but if they had published the explanation first then there would have been no fires.
There’s a simple trick to sharing bad news or announcing an unpopular change in policy, one which will cut the angry shouting by 90%.
As I learned about a decade ago, the trick is to share the explanation first and the bad news second. It short-circuits the angry response, and it really is that simple:
In the case of O’Reilly Media, what they should have said first was that direct ebook sales no longer justified keeping the store open.
Alas, they did not tell anyone this until Friday, two days after informing customers that the store was closing.
According to the O’Reilly blog, both print and ebooks sales are on the decline:
Meanwhile, sales of books have declined consistently year after year since 2000! Ebooks expanded the market for a while, and direct distribution from oreilly.com was a great way to make them widely available while traditional retailers other than Amazon were slow to embrace that market. But starting a few years ago, ebook sales too started to flatten, and then to fall. Running oreilly.com as a distribution platform was effective, but also costly. It required a dedicated investment in e-commerce software, staff, marketing, and so on. It also required us to choose whether to direct incoming customers to the declining e-commerce business to buy standalone units, or to our growing subscription business.
O’Reilly is seeing the same trend that has nonfiction authors retiring, worries academic publishers, and has also disrupted the college bookstore industry, leading B&N Edu to turn some of their bookstores into gift shops.
The trend I am referring to is: Books are no longer the main way people learn.
They have been supplanted by niche websites, online forums like StackExchange, video services like Youtube and Pluralsight, and a dozen other digital sources.
O’Reilly has even seen this trend in their own products:
As new learning modalities emerged, O’Reilly moved to embrace new formats. We developed an amazing video training series (thanks to a talented author base and editorial team willing to try something new), we purchased a small screencasting company and integrated it into our editorial offerings, we developed Oriole, our own interactive learning technology that integrates video and in-browser coding, and developed a formative assessment program for our popular video learning paths.
And that has led them to this crossroad. "So we had to make a tough decision, and we chose to support the side of the business that has the most customers, that is growing the fastest, and that supports all of the learning modalities that customers are demanding," O’Reilly president Laura Baldwin wrote in the post on Friday.
In short, there’s no chance of O’Reilly reversing their decision, but there is a small light at the end of the tunnel.
O’Reilly isn’t going to reopen the store, but they will start offering PDFs through their subscription service:
After our announcement, the bulk of your requests have been for PDFs versus kindle or EPUB format. We’re already working on offering PDF downloads as part of the Safari subscription, as well as other new features to support offline reading. And we are looking into ways for our resellers to support unit sales of PDFs. I regret that we didn’t get those arrangements in place in advance of this announcement.
O’Reilly could have also given themselves a grace period to solve this kind of problem simply by putting off the closure for a month.
Or better yet, O’Reilly could have found a replacement store first and announced its closure second.
In fact, I can think of one such store that would fit the bill.
Baen Books has been selling DRM-free multi-format ebooks for as long as O’Reilly. Yes, Baen is an SF&F publisher, but their store meets almost all the requirements for a replacement to the O’Reilly store.
The only way Baen comes up short is that they don’t currently sell PDFs. Founder Jim Baen abhorred the format, and no one saw a reason to go against his wishes in the decade since he died.
Now would be a good time, don’t you think?
image by ell brown
Technical publisher O’Reilly was an early ebook pioneer. They released their ebooks DRM-free in many formats, sold direct to consumers, and offered print-digital bundles before anyone else.
Now the trailblazing has come to an end. O’Reilly sent out an email yesterday to its customers with the news that it was closing its ebookstore (coincidentally, I just learned I have two accounts at O’Reilly):
Things are changing at the O’Reilly online shop—as of today, we are no longer selling individual books and videos via shop.oreilly.com. Of course, we’ll continue to publish books and videos on the topics you need to know, like data science, product management, and leadership—and you’ll still be able to buy them at Amazon and other retailers. And these important things about your O’Reilly account are staying exactly the same:
- You’ll still have access to every ebook and video listed in "Your Products" on your O’Reilly account page.
- We’ll alert you when those products are updated, and you can download the revised version from the "Your Products" page.
- You can still send the O’Reilly ebooks you’ve purchased to Dropbox and/or Google Drive.
O’Reilly will continue to offer its ebooks through Safari Books Online, its subscription service. And of course it distributes ebooks through the Kindle Store and other retailers where the ebooks are available for sale or rent.
This is a shame, but not surprise. O’Reilly launched its ebookstore at a time where that store was the easiest and least painful way to get ebooks to customers.
Now most ebook sales are made through the Kindle Store, and a lot of people get their technical books through Safari. (In fact, I would not be surprised if O’Reilly had done a cost benefit analysis and learned that Safari generated more revenue.)
Edit: Nailed it.
So why the change? It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use their content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We’ve already seen this in our own business—the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That’s one reason for the change.
When Standard eBooks first gained widespread attention last week, a number of people complained about that project’s stated intention to alter the ebooks it created by changing the punctuation and modernizing the spelling.
A Standard eBooks explained on its site:
Older books often contain archaic spelling and hyphenation that can be distracting for today’s readers. On top of our strict typography standards, each Standard Ebook is lightly modernized to feature consistent and modern spelling and hyphenation, so old-fashioned ephemera doesn’t distract you from timeless content.
That might not bother most readers, but not everyone is happy with th changes. For example:
Noooooo!! Half the joy of older books is the spelling, grammar and punctuation!
— Suw (@Suw) June 20, 2017
And:
Also, the argument that “old-fashioned ephemera” would distract from timeless content – content that’s no longer timeless.
— Craig Grannell (@CraigGrannell) June 20, 2017
They do have a point, and it’s not just a fetish for originalism.
One problem with "modernization" is that the editor might conflate two words that merely have similar spellings, but even if the editor is aware of a word’s etymological history they might still introduce errors.
The meaning of a word can change along with its spelling. For example, if an editor tried to replace wyrd with the more modern spelling of weird, they would radically change the meaning of the text by replacing a synonym of the word chance with one that means strange.
Furthermore, even if you leave the words alone, simply changing the punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence. There are obsolete forms of punctuation which do not quite have the same meaning as modern marks.
As Keith Houston explained in his book, Shady Characters, it used to be standard practice to pair a dash with a comma, period, or other mark for greater emphasis.
… in the 1622 edition of Shakespeare’s Othello, where the comma, colon, semicolon, and even the period collude with the em dash to add weight to otherwise standard pauses and semantic markers. In the second act, for instance, Iago declares: “I’ll tell you what you shall do, — our general’s wife is now the general”; act III sees Desdemona reassure Cassio: “O that’s an honest fellow: — do not doubt, Cassio,” and in the climactic finale Othello spits, “O strumpet, — weepest thou for him to my face?”
The comma-dash, or “commash” (,—), and its companions the “colash” (:—) and “semi-colash” (;—)* grew in status until they were almost ubiquitous, and the words of Captain Ahab, Fagin, and Elizabeth Bennet were liberally seasoned with such “dashtards,” as Baker called them. Given its comparative rarity, Baker understandably declined to acknowledge the stop-dash (.—); even in an era when the printed page fairly danced with extraneous commas, when dashes coupled promiscuously with other marks and “ quotations ” came with built-in safety margins, the contradiction inherent in such a pairing was too rich for the average writer.
You will find those compound punctuation marks in the Project Gutenberg copy of Moby Dick, but you will not find them in the PG’s copy of Othello or some other works of Shakespeare (I did find them in parts of the omnibus collected works, however.).
Update: Project Gutenberg doesn’t have a consistent policy on modernization:
interesting discussion here – preserve original, archaic punctuation or make the text "more readable"… at PG depends on actual transcriber https://t.co/BoFpAu4svX
— Project Gutenberg (@gutenberg_org) June 29, 2017
When present, the compound marks add emphasis, but you might not find them in all of an author’s work. Which one is authentic? Were the compound marks inserted by an earlier editor, or removed?
that raises a whole new question when it comes to modernizing a text.
Both Keith Houston and the Project Gutenberg editor cite authentic and original copies of Shakespeare’s work and say they found different punctuation.
Which one is correct?
And more importantly, should we care?
Given that these ebooks are not produced by or for academics, one could reasonably argue that this level of attention to detail is not worth the effort. Standard eBooks is just trying to produce ebooks for people to read, not works that will last for posterity.
But if you accept that argument then it would follow that one need not keep the original spelling.
Thoughts?
image by Matt Hampel
Amazon has partnered with China Mobile telecom to release a new Kindle in China.
The Amazon Kindle X Migu is a basic Kindle with extra software features. It costs 658 yuan, or $96.21 USD, and ships on 10 July.
Note: Migu is the name of China Mobile’s content sub.
The Kindle X MiGu has all the same great features as the regular Kindle: X-Ray, annotation, long battery life, and access to a half million titles in the Chinese Kindle Store.
It also ships with a free year’s subscription to Amazon Prime Kindle Unlimited, but that’s not its most interesting detail.
When it ships next month, Kindle X MiGu owners will be able to buy ebooks in the Kindle Store with their China Mobile account, and have the payment processed along with their monthly cellphone bill.
They will also have the option of buying ebooks from MiGu’s ebookstore, and reading them on their Kindles.
MiGu’s store sells serial ebooks by the chapter, and according to one source carries 40 million works. All will be accessible from the new Kindle, and to encourage sales the Kindle X MiGu will come with 300 yuan in credits for the MiGu store.
Yes, this is the first Kindle to ship with two bookstores.
This is not the first ereader to have multiple ebookstores (Bebook pioneered the concept in early 2010), but it is the first Kindle that used someone else’s bookstore.
Amazon has apparently decided to apply the maxim "if you can’t beat them, join them".
Amazon is the single largest ebook retailer in the western world and accounts for an estimated 82% of ebook sales in the top five English-language markets, but in China and many other parts of Asia Amazon is still in second place to its local competitors.
And so today Amazon is coopting one of those competitors by bringing new content to its Kindle and offering China Mobile’s customers a new way to consume the content they like.
Publishers like HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have recently shown increased interest in the pay per loan library ebook services offered by Freading and Hoopla, but at the same time libraries are pulling back.
Publishers like this model because they get paid each time a work is loaned to a patron.
At first, librarians also liked the model because it meant they would not have to pay full price to get copies that might go unused, but then the monthly bills started arriving and the honeymoon ended.
Many libraries have imposed caps on their Hoopla offering. Some have reduced the number of works a patron can borrow each month while others have set a limit on the number of loans made each calendar day.
Sonoma County Library, which is located just north of San Francisco, has a daily lending limit which resets every day at 8pm eastern, while on the other side of San Francisco the San Jose Public Library now limits patrons to only borrowing 6 works each month.
The SJPL made it clear that the problem was the cost of Hoopla:
We love this resource, and we want everyone to have a chance to use it. That means that we have to figure out a way to make our payment model fair for everyone. After giving it a great deal of thought, we have decided that a way we can make Hoopla available to every one of our users is to decrease the monthly limit from 8 items to 6 items. This will take effect on November 1. We hope that this will help us manage the cost so that we can keep providing this great content!
The West Fargo Public Library in North Dakota has also reduced its monthly limit.
The Appomattox Regional Library also cited budget constraints as the cause of their daily lending limits. "Due to an increased number of users on the service and with the budget amount allocated for Hoopla, we are finding that the budget caps we have in place for daily usage and monthly limits are being reached much more quickly than in the past, the FAQ reads. "We are working on a solution and are so grateful that such a large number of patrons are interested in using Hoopla."
And then there is CLEVNET, a consortium of 43 library systems in northern Ohio. The Sandusky Register reports that CLEVNET offered Hoopla for a year and then dropped it because the cost was double what had been anticipated.
Many of the libraries that make up CLEVNET decided to keep Hoopla and fund it out of their respective budgets. Few have had trouble with funding, but then again only 2% or 3% of their patrons are signed up. As that number grows, the libraries are bound to be facing a budget crunch.
image by Changhai Travis