The New York Times - May 1, 2013
WRESTLING with my newspaper on the subway recently, I noticed the woman
next to me reading a book on her smartphone. “That has to hurt your
eyes,” I commented. Not missing a beat, she replied, in true New York
style, “My font is bigger than yours.” She was right.
The information revolution raises profound questions about the future of
books, reading and libraries. While publishers have been nimble about
marketing e-books to consumers, until very recently they’ve been mostly
unwilling to sell e-books to libraries to lend, fearful that doing so
would hurt their business, which is under considerable pressure.
Negotiations between the nation’s libraries and the Big Six publishers —
Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House and
Simon & Schuster, which publish roughly two-thirds of the books in
America — have gone in fits and starts. Today Hachette, which had been a
holdout, is joining the others in announcing that it will make e-books
available to public libraries. This is a big step, as it represents, for
the first time, a consensus among the Big Six, at least in principle,
that their e-books should be made available to library users.
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