Kahle: Will Libraries Exist in 25 Years?

Brewster Kahle’s “Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years” in Time asks provocative and important questions. While we won’t be giving up print completely any time soon—for now, it offers the best return on tax $$, better ensures preservation, and can bridge the digital divide (while presenting access obstacles of its own), yes, libraries must become digital as well. And yes, some trends point to emergence of an information corporatocracy : “ Global media corporations—emboldened by the expansive copyright laws they helped craft and the emerging technology that reaches right into our reading devices—are exerting absolute control over digital information. . . . If we fail to forge the right path, publishers’ business models could eliminate one of the great tools for democratizing society: our independent libraries. Right now, these corporate publishers are squeezing libraries in ways that may render it impossible for any library to own digital texts in five years, let alone 25. Soon, librarians will be reduced to customer service reps for a Netflix-like rental catalog of bestsellers. If that comes to pass, you might as well replace your library card with a credit card.”

While alarmist, this statement is not hyperbole. Current licensing models from most of the Big 5, academic, and school market publishers are changing in ways that make it difficult for libraries to maintain robust and sustainable digital collections. License models are often limited in an area where one size definitely doesn’t fit all. Publishers have no incentive to offer titles once they lose commercial value, and not only have many older but valuable titles have never been digitized but libraries have no right to maintain digital copies for preservation of the intellectual record. The cost to license and relicense under the current “exploding” terms funnel access primarily to high-demand titles, starving the reading of works that might highlight “marginalized voices, providing information to the disadvantaged, and preserving cultural memory independent of those in power.”

Two possible solutions are under challenge. Controlled digital lending is threatened with a lawsuit, while the buying of ebooks—which the Internet Archive is doing on a limited basis because few publishers will engage with them—is not a model the larger publishers seem willing to adopt, refusing even to engage in perpetual licenses.

Kahle says “As we shift from print to digital, we can and must support institutions and practices that were refined over hundreds of years starting with selling ebooks to readers and libraries.” He doesn’t say how, but the call for advocacy is clear and must be heeded. Legislation that puts digital content into the hands of readers, students, and researchers must come at a level beyond the states, though Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island legislation is a start. The balance that copyright is intended to provide between rights holders and users is, in the digital realm, tilted too far towards the holders under current licensing terms. Some redress is necessary if the mission of libraries can be continued.