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Boycott HarperCollins (boycottharpercollins.com)

20 points by abc3 ↗ HN
Thanks to isitrainingnow.com and downforeveryoneorjustme.com and other, similarly designed websites for inspiring us.

Just to be clear, we're not leading anything, just documenting what happened and making it easy for people who do participate in a HarperCollins boycott to know when it's over.

As soon as HarperCollins reconsiders its decision, we'll change the "Yes" on the front page to a "No," revise a few of the other words in bold letters, and update the text on the explanation page. That's been the point of our design from the beginning. While we don't know if HarperCollins will ever revisit its policy, we want to be prepared if it does.

5 comments

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iwwr
Does anyone know the details on this? Never knew there was such a thing as e-book library 'renting'.
nkassis
My wife who's studying to be a Librarian explained to me the situation. Overdrive http://www.overdrive.com/default.aspx provides software to library that lets them loan out ebooks with DRM that expires after 2 weeks. Also the library can't loan the book to more than one library user at a time.

HarperCollins wasn't happy that ebooks could be loaned out infinitely and decided to add another restriction to the license it has with Overdrive. This would limit the amount of time a library can loan books to about 26 times. Which is a ridiculous amount. (I'd like to see data on how many times on average books have been loaned before needing replacement. I'd wager it's more than 26 times)

silencio
As if those artificial limitations (really? one ebook for one user?) weren't bad enough, you can't "return" books early. So if I finish the latest [insert popular novel] in a day but my lending period is 2 weeks, the next person on the waiting list won't be getting it for another 13 days because of yet another artificial limitation.

It's been pointed out by many librarians in comments to articles/blog posts about the situation that the average rate of loss/wear and tear for physical books may be enough to warrant buying a new copy after 26 checkouts, but that the more suspicious thing is that 26 checkouts of an ebook for 2 weeks at a time back to back (and again, no early returns) is exactly one year.

iwwr
There are already artificial limits in place with physical books. They are much more expensive if libraries buy them. You can't just make your private books available on a library basis, you'd be breaking several IP edicts (having to purchase the 'library versions')..
xiongchiamiov
Really? My family's donated many books to our local library, and they didn't seem to have any issue with that.