The public library is often put forward as one articulation of public space: access to knowledge for all, equally, with an emphasis on personal agency and privacy. If we are to consider digital public spaces, then what qualities would it share with the space of a public library? What, indeed, are digital products and services doing to the library?
On the face of it, ebooks should be a boon to libraries, encouraging wider reading and sharing, reducing costs, and increasing provision for poorer, older, and differently abled people. Digital books can be shared many times at once, effectively increasing library stocks. Catalogues can be exponentially, if not infinitely, larger. While there are many good arguments to retain ebook prices on the open market at levels which allow publishers and authors to continue to make a living - and this is true too of library editions, which often form a significant proportion of publisher revenues - accommodations can certainly be made in the name of the public good, as they always have been. Digital texts can also be turned into speaking books for the blind, or large format editions, at the touch of a button. But in practice, this is not the way ebooks have been affecting libraries in the real world.
Digital books actually return a huge amount of agency to the publisher, and publishers have been using this leverage to control how libraries stock and issue their books. Ebooks are often stocked on the condition that they continue be be loaned in the same manner as physical books: many libraries still mark a borrowed ebook as "out" (and therefore unavailable to other readers) just like a paper book, despite the electronic copy's infinite reproducibility. Others insist readers visit the actual building to download and "check out" ebooks. In 2011, HarperCollins tried to stipulate that its ebooks could only be borrowed 26 times. After this, the file would self-destruct, in accordance with the belief that this is the average lifespan of a worn-and-torn paper lending copy. Finally, many ebook producers are attempting to destroy the "first sale doctrine" which states that those who purchase a book (or many other items) have the right to sell it on, loan it out, and so on. First sale is one of the "traditional safety valves" of copyright laws, ensuring that reasonable copyright is not over-extended. When a library cannot control the conditions of loan of their books, and when they are prevented from selling on overstocked or out-of-date holdings, they lose an ongoing source of revenue, as well as their own autonomy. All of these effects are direct consequences of the political, corporate control which it is possible to embed into digital systems.
While libraries retain many important uses that make them important to retain, it may turn out that many of the book-centric operations of the public library are simply incompatible with digital books. Libraries are not just places to read books, they are public spaces providing a range of services. These are essential to people on lower incomes, beneficial to all, and they are adjusting to different roles. Many contemporary institutions are learning to emphasise the library as a space to work, think and connect. Plenty of physical media can be retained, but their use might well be secondary, while much of visitors activity is conducted online and with one another as with the collection.
What this tells us is that libraries as public spaces are conditional on them being physical spaces, as all other values are slowly reabsorbed back into corporate, private space. The problems with ebooks in the context of the library are a microcosm of the problem of all concepts of digital public space. The form of public space articulated by the library cannot exist online, which is always subject to corporate and geographic pressures which may be distant from, and obscure to, its users. The postgeographic conception of the internet is a fallacy, exposed by its interaction with other systems, including legal and meteorological ones. It is not outside geographical influence if it is subject to the weather, as in the major disruption to Amazon's cloud services by severe storms in June of 2012. It is not outside political control if it can be disrupted by legal demands, whether that is cryptographic control of ebook affordances, or judicial oversight of physical servers and data facilities. Digital space is always owned in some way: there is no true commons online.
This should not be news. Outwith the library, the wrath visited upon attempts at asserting the right of public protest across multiple interests and locations in the last few years should show to what extent the concept of public space has been degraded. True public space has been under attack from every direction in the UK and elsewhere for far longer than the internet has been around, and it would be naive to think that this trend is not continued online, in a space that emerges from military research and governmental-corporate administration.
The only truly public space of books is and always has been the space of the imagination. This would appear to be true of digital spaces as well.
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