An article with that title appeared in today's New York Times, recounting the ongoing negotiations between public libraries and ebook publishers concerning publishers' willingness to provide their ebooks to public libraries for patrons' reading.
It's a complex issue, involving wider public access to information and literature, fair compensation to authors for their books, and inevitably, publishers' profit margins for books sold. Ebooks are gaining a larger and larger share of the market for books. "E-book readership," the article reports, "is rising much faster than readership of print books; digital books could soon be the most popular book format. Readership of [the New York Public Library's] e-books soared 168 percent from 2011 to 2012; print circulation, while much larger, remained constant."
The publishers are slowly opening up to provide copies of their ebooks to libraries, but remain apprehensive about the impact on their businesses. All impose some kind of limits on the number of books provided to libraries and/or the number of books those libraries are permitted to circulate; and of course the model of "circulation" for ebooks is slipprier than for physical books.
The publishing industry, like most others, has moved toward a small number of very large conglomerates. Self-publication by ebook authors and small entrepreneurs like TidBITS offer a lively and desireable challenge. An earlier Times article last November, "How Dead is the Book Business?", summarizes the current publishing world:
"Random House, an arm of the media company Bertelsmann in Germany, is itself made up of former independents like Knopf and Pantheon. Penguin, a division of the education publisher Pearson, contains Dutton, Viking and others. If market forces were the only concern, it’s possible that there would soon be only one or two publishers and that they might be folded into some larger infotainment company like Time Warner Penguin or maybe Random Viacom....
"But it’s difficult to imagine how, in the digital world, publishers could ever monopolize the sale of written material. Even if there were only one house left, it would compete with every blogger and self-published e-book author. Eventually, it’s likely that book publishing will embody both conflicting visions of digital-age commerce — lots of small businesses and a few massive ones....
Like Amazon.
It may be that the issue of patents is becoming a critical battleground — a ground in which the little guys are at a considerable disadvantage:
"Reuters recently reported that Amazon (which somehow holds a patent for the 'one-click shopping' button) was hiring several high-profile patent lawyers with the mandate to identify and evaluate strategic I.P. acquisition and licensing opportunities.' The company has argued that it buys up patents to defend against the lawsuits of others. That may be partly true, but the worst fate for readers isn’t the merger of a few struggling companies in a diminishing business. It’s the threat of another U.S. Steel."