Digital community


In her career Jennie has explored many aspects of the profession from tradi- tional library work to digital and library technology.


This continues at Library Futures where she says the work she is most proud of is at the community level. Digital communities have always played a vital part in her experience and views. She says: “I’ve always been interested in communities, particularly online communities. I think, like a lot of people in their thirties, I very much grew up in online communities.” But they have their limitations – par- ticularly around hard facts. This became clearer during her mother’s illness. In the very first blog post on the Library Futures website, Jennie explained how that information landscape was a treacherous place, even for experts. “Despite my training as a librarian, I informed myself with faulty, surveilled, and incomplete information because I had no choice. As she slipped away from me, I felt first-hand the impact of withholding publicly funded infor- mation from people who need it. Our stories shine a spotlight on the avarice of an industry that places the blame on libraries, authors, researchers, or read- ers for the increasing corporatisation of science and the useful arts.”


The opposition


So what is Library Futures up against? “Publishers exist to create profit and libraries exist to provide better and more equitable access. For hundreds of years these two aims were complimen- tary but as the publishers have become more squeezed and have felt their role in society slipping, their aims have become oppositional.”


Most of the squeezing has been done by Amazon: “In their book Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say the publishing indus-


March 2023


Jennie Rose Halperin.


try gave away the keys to the castle to Amazon, creating a chokepoint, an inter- mediary between the company, the artist, the library, the resource and the payment, effectively handing over control of the book market to a big corporation. “It seems like publishers don’t know what to do in the digital market at this point. One of the research projects coming out of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy (which Library Futures has recently joined) is a large-scale research paper on the publishing industry and where they want to move digitally.”


The work


In the Summer of 2021 two states – Mary- land and New York – voted for laws that required publishers to offer “reasonable” ebook licences to public libraries if they sold ebooks to consumers in those states. The bills both had strong democrat- ic support – in Maryland the vote was unanimous, in New York it was almost unanimous.


But the Association of American Pub- lishers sued the state of Maryland, saying the law created a “shadow Copyright Act”


that bypassed or pre-empted the federal copyright law. The challenge stopped the bills, and later copyright regulators and a judge accepted the publishers’ arguments. The library community does not agree with those rulings but acknowledges that a challenge at the federal level could take “many years of litigations and appeals,” while libraries still suffer.


The original bill was designed by the Maryland Library Association and not- for-profit organisation Reader’s First. It had two parts – one was to stop publish- ers refusing to lease ebooks to libraries at all, the other was to make sure that the contracts were reasonable when they did. The first is the area that has proven most problematic.


Library Futures, which was only estab- lished six months before the Maryland bill was stopped, proposed a new model bill, published in June 2022, which focuses on the second part – the contract. A number of states that had already submitted bills like those in Maryland and New York have amended them along the lines suggested by Library Futures.


“The ebooks bills are springing up to INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 29


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