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On Tuesday, I recorded an upcoming episode of Digital Campus with my old colleagues at CHNM and another “special guest”, Jennifer Howard; near the end of the podcast (now available here), I floated an idea that I’d like to get out in the broader online discussion of eBooks. I’d like to get it fleshed out a bit (and linkable), so, that’s what’s gotten me off my butt to actually start writing here again. Maybe I’ll even make it a habit.

One of the emerging themes in the digital book world that has shown up prominently in several big news stories over the past few weeks has been the idea of lending, and its place in the digital world. First Barnes & Noble’s new Nook promised the ability to lend an ebook from one device to another, while still only allowing one reader (in both the device and user sense) to read a given purchased copy at a time. This has been hailed as one of the big advancements over either the Kindle or the Sony Reader, and fits with our general sense of what it means to “buy” a book (however applicable that word actually is in the digital realm).

Then, the Internet Archive, in announcing its new BookServer architecture, made a sidelong claim that their book trading zone would enable an owner of a digital copy to “lend” it to another user; moreover, Brewster Kahle advanced a claim he’s been nursing for a while, that in fact the spirit of first sale implies that the owner of a physical book should be able to “lend” a digital copy of that purchased book so long as she didn’t use the physical book while the virtual one was “out for circulation”…essentially, that the IA had put the technology in place to enable users to treat the purchase of a book as a one-simultaneous-user license for that book, regardless of whether that use was physical or digital.

At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, so what? It’s an interesting argument, and I like the principle of lending, but it’s just another example of treating digital books like physical ones, a little bit of sugar to make the DRM go down. There’s nothing transformational here.”

Except that we forget that lending only works because most people don’t. Lend, that is. Most physical books spend the vast majority of their existence sitting on shelves, waiting to be read. Now, imagine that lending can happen in a digitally-networked, global ecosystem in which the borrower of a book doesn’t need to know the lender, and which can be optimized so that the moment that a book is no longer being used, it’s immediately available to be borrowed again. Push further – what does “use” mean in such a context? If borrowing and returning happen at Twitter-speed in a persistently-networked environment, then the moment that the borrower’s eyeballs aren’t scanning a book, it could be considered “returned” and thus available for another user.

In short, assuming a hyper-efficient distribution system, how many truly simultaneous users are there for a given text? And if Brewster’s logic holds and the purchase of a physical book is understood under a reading of first sale to effectively constitute a single-simultaneous-user license, then the market for sales of a given book retracts from the number of people or institutions who might want to read a book (and thus buy it in anticipation of use) to the maximum number of people worldwide who are *actively reading* that book at any given moment in time. This also means that those individuals and institutions (like libraries) that have large stores of books could be sitting on top of a huge amount of untapped value in the form of potential readers for their materials, provided a scan could be created.

There are a number of places this could lead, but there’s one that I find most intriguing and unexpected: what if this very idea is what pushes small-run publishing out of the fabrication of print books altogether, and wholly into the arms of digital-only licensing models with their much-less-leaky rights regimes? Who’d have thought that the physical book might turn out to be way more flexible and subversive than a born-digital copy? Either way, there’s a huge, open question as to how efficient networked digital lending will be allowed to become.

Comments One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.

Eric Hellman,

December 15, 2009 at 7:29 pm

In fact, public libraries have a statutory right to make copies of out-of-print books that are too damaged to lend, and to make them available inside the libraries. This becomes really exciting when you consider that it’s possible to do interlibrary loan of these damaged book copies.

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November 13, 2009 Briefly Noted for November 13, 2009

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