Back Talk — Kicking Stones Loose: A Modest Proposal

Column Editor: Ann Okerson (Director, Offline Internet Consortium) <aokerson@gmail.com>

I remember the good public library of my childhood. It seemed to have all the riches of the world’s knowledge and literature spread out before me, free for me to read. Maybe it wasn’t all there, but once I was in that lovely quiet building, there were no obstacles, only riches. The world of digital text ought to be like that — maybe even better. There’s no technology reason why we could not have every book ever published and acquired by a library somewhere instantly and digitally available to the world’s readers.

But that’s not how things are. The books of the 20th and 21st centuries can be surprisingly and painfully difficult to find, access, and read. If, while typing this paragraph, I were to get the urge to read Moby-Dick, I could stop and find an online copy, load it to my device, and start reading, all in the time that it takes to finish this paragraph and write the next one. But a more recent book? Many best-sellers I can probably get from a good public library, but publishers haven’t yet figured out how to make these affordably available for the libraries that provide such a service. Money has to change hands — in many cases a considerable sum — and even then many more contemporary books aren’t available.

Remember Allen Drury? Advise and Consent was a blockbuster bestseller and Hollywood movie of about 1960. He went on to write a variety of political novels and thrillers — absolutely none of which are in my excellent local public library. Nothing of his appears in Hathi Trust’s collection, and, even if it did, likely these could not be made publicly available. Some of his books are available on Amazon — that is, in a proprietary format, for sale only, with unspeakably bad metadata and very little likelihood of a preservation plan in place. I’ve done similar probes on some other authors of literary fiction and non-fiction from the same period: James (later Jan) Morris, Rose Macaulay, Wilfred Thesiger, Alan Moorehead. Struck out on many. So much literature is slipping away from us, as is much of the scholarly writing of recent decades. Really current books outside the world of popular readership, if electronically available, are almost all behind paywalls and will remain there for a good long time.

There’s only so much we can do about authors who have passed, but what can we do about the flood of works from still-living authors?

Some things are already happening with brand new monographic publications. Knowledge Unlatched is a decade old; various individual academic publishers are advancing experiments, mainly of a medium scale. Central European University Press is noteworthy in this regard. DOAB offers a roadmap to what’s available. But too little movement is happening, and it’s far from clear what sustainable models will emerge.

May I offer one possibility?

Looking backward, first, we should remember that a striking feature of academic publishers’ contracts for a long time (and sometimes even still today) was the reversion-of-rights clause. It said that when a book went “out of print” for some defined period (for example, six months), the author could reclaim the rights that had been assigned to the publisher and make their own disposition of the book’s future. This never happened on any real scale, because a book, whose publisher did not think there was any longer a print market, probably wasn’t a compelling acquisition for another publisher, and authors themselves had no easy way to reproduce such a book in the print era.

But, these days, another possibility opens: take back these rights, digitize, and make the books freely available. There are examples of such actions, but what is required to accomplish them on a larger scale — apart from interest by the author — is a commitment from the library sector to support (with some help) digitization and hosting-in-perpetuity for titles withdrawn from the commercial contract of first publication. To do this requires informed authors to make firm requests of their publishers. My strong sense is that publishers do recognize a point at which the commercial viability of a book has faded and free distribution is, in fact, good for both the publisher and author. (One difficulty is that some publishers will aver that making a book available for sale by print-ondemand is enough to count as keeping the book “in print.” But books trickling out the door at the very far end of the long tail of readership are not, in fact, likely to provide attractive revenue streams.)

What would it take to accomplish this particular scenario? We’d need to reach out to academic authors who’ve written books previously and also to create a toolkit for authors currently writing books, to support early conversations with publishers about a plan for current and future stages of distribution: hardcover, paperback, eBook-for-sale, and eventually eBook open-access. Libraries would need to organize a distributed network of hosts with a common interface and common metadata standards that would allow authors easy and inexpensive paths to digital distribution (large parts of such a system already exist). At a minimum, creating a concept for a life-cycle for the initially published book will be good for all parties.

Who should participate in such a developmental conversation? The American Council of Learned Societies was visionary twenty-odd years ago with the Humanities Ebook project (not OA, but very moderately priced for libraries). Foundation support for development of standards and tools could be surprisingly modest in cost. AAP and the Authors Alliance could provide moral and intellectual support and “marketing” to academic authors for solutions that serve the needs of all. This can’t be a solo effort, but it can be achieved by collaboration, initially through a pilot project.

What would success look like? Making both legacy and new material more widely available sooner than later would set a welcome and persuasive example of what’s possible. Landslides can happen. They begin with a few stones from the top of the mountain coming loose and bounding down the slope. Those stones never return to the top: more follow, and then, at some point, more and more and more. I’m convinced that the challenge is to find a way to move towards a tipping point at which, over a quite short period of time, it suddenly seems apparent that what is technologically possible — universal access to a huge universal library — is both desirable and, for the health of free societies, necessary.

What is the goal? Easy, wide access to books, immediately upon publication or not long after, is a worthy goal that is a long way from being realized. We would further enable libraries to be libraries in every respect — institutions that collect, care for, and preserve the cultural products of humankind. Therefore, we need a mix of strategies to make sure that all the books we want to make available and to preserve move into the free space of libraries sooner or later, preferably sooner. Tackling a manageable subset of academic books whose rights have reverted or could revert to authors, is one such strategy.

Let us kick the first stones loose.