Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 25th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































March 25th, 2023




The Internet Archive Is a Library

A lawsuit against the Internet Archive threatens the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades, say a group of current and former university librarians.
Dave Hansen, Deborah Jakubs, Chris Bourg, Thomas Leonard, Jeff MacKie-Mason, Joseph A. Salem Jr., MacKenzie Smith, and Winston Tabb

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in San Francisco, has grown into one of the most important cultural institutions of the modern age. What began in 1996 as an audacious attempt to archive and preserve the World Wide Web has grown into a vast library of books, musical recordings and television shows, all digitized and available online, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

Right now, we are at a pivotal stage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive, still pending, brought by four of the biggest for-profit publishers in the world, who have been trying to shut down core programs of the archive since the start of the pandemic. For the sake of libraries and library users everywhere, let’s hope they don’t succeed.

You’ve probably heard of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives billions of webpages from across the globe. Fewer are familiar with its other extraordinary collections, which include 41 million digitized books and texts, with more than three million books available to borrow. To make this possible, Internet Archive uses a practice known as “controlled digital lending,” “whereby a library owns a book, digitizes it, and loans either the physical book or the digital copy to one user at a time.”

Despite its incredible library collections, which serve the needs of millions of people, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons Inc., and Penguin Random House assert that the Internet Archive is not a real library.

In their lawsuit against the Internet Archive, which could extract millions of dollars from the nonprofit organization, the publishers claim that the Internet Archive “badly misleads the public and boldly misappropriates the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.” In their view, the archive’s “efforts to brand itself as a library” are part of a scheme to “fraudulently mislead” people, circumvent copyright law and limit how much profit publishers can extract from the ebook market. They describe the Internet Archive as a “pirate site” and its business model as “parasitic and illegal” and characterize controlled digital lending as “an invented paradigm that is well outside copyright law.”

The Internet Archive, in turn, argues that the practice of controlled digital lending constitutes fair use under copyright law, and asserts that “libraries have been practicing CDL in one form or another for more than a decade, and hundreds of libraries use it to lend books digitally today.”

Why is it so important to the publishers that the Internet Archive not be identified as a library? Primarily because Congress has long recognized the valuable role that libraries play in our copyright system and has created special allowances in the law for their work. In this suit, the publishers seek to redefine the Internet Archive on their own terms and, in so doing, deny it the ability to leverage the same legal tools that thousands of other libraries use to lend and disseminate materials to our users.

The argument that the Internet Archive isn’t a library is wrong. If this argument is accepted, the results would jeopardize the future development of digital libraries nationwide. The Internet Archive is the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades. It is one of the only major memory institutions to be created from the emergence of the internet. It is, and continues to be, a modern-day cultural institution built intentionally in response to the technological revolution through which we’ve lived.

Libraries are defined by collections, services and values. In The Librarian’s Book of Lists (ALA, 2010), George M. Eberhart offers this definition: “A library is a collection of resources in a variety of formats that is (1) organized by information professionals or other experts who (2) provide convenient physical, digital, bibliographic, or intellectual access and (3) offer targeted services and programs (4) with the mission of educating, informing, or entertaining a variety of audiences (5) and the goal of stimulating individual learning and advancing society as a whole.”

The Internet Archive has all these characteristics. It is a one-of-a-kind independent research library, with its holdings fully available in digital form. Its substantial physical and digital collections are unique. It employs librarians and other information professionals. It is open to all interested readers. It cooperates with peer libraries in support of archiving the information and contemporary discourse as manifested in the World Wide Web. It has an active community of researchers who depend on its collections. And it is an engaged, responsive, resource-sharing partner to hundreds of peer libraries. It is also now an integral part of the interlibrary loan system, sharing its holdings with other libraries worldwide. It shares the keystone values of all libraries: preservation, access, privacy, intellectual freedom, diversity, lifelong learning and the public good. And it does all this without commercial motive as a mission-driven not-for-profit organization.

Those of us who have worked with the Internet Archive or drawn on its many offerings have long seen the organization as a peer. The Internet Archive fulfills the mission of a library in ways we could only dream of a few decades ago.

We cannot defend against the publishers’ lawsuit. We can, however, stand with Internet Archive as it fights for the right to buy, preserve and lend books, which is what libraries do.
https://www.insidehighered.com/views...rchive-opinion





R.I.P. Zippyshare, the File-Sharing Website with Download Buttons as Big as its Heart

The founders cited increased competition, ad blockers, and rising electricity costs in their open letter.
Jordan Darville

It's been a tumultuous seven-ish days for internet users of a certain generation. Last Sunday, rumors began to circulate that the legendary mixtape archive DatPiff was gone for good, though the site denied that less than a day later, blaming "technical issues" with its website and app for the user issues. Unfortunately, it seems that another giant of the blog era is really and truly shutting its doors: Zippyshare, the file-sharing website that hosted terabytes of music both legal and pirated, will go offline on March 31.

The site's founders announced the closure on March 19 via a blog post. Citing a decrease in usage, increased electricity costs, and the prevalent use of ad blockers, Zippyshare's administrators said that the site had become too expensive to run. "There are still a bunch of smaller reasons," they write, "but we could write a book on this, and probably no one would want to read it."

If there are any files on Zippyshare that you need – rare mixtapes, for example, or intriguing albums from music scenes in far-flung locales, the kind of stuff you could reliably find on Zippyshare – you have two weeks to download before everything becomes permanently inaccessible. So, for old time's sake, let's all attempt to navigate Zippyshare's infamous download page together and grab all the (RIAA-approved, of course) Gucci Mane projects that we can.
https://www.thefader.com/2023/03/20/zippyshare-closing





HDD Average Life Span Misses 3-Year Mark in Study of 2,007 Defective Drives

Data recovery firm blames SMR and size, following limited analysis.
Scharon Harding

An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) has led a data recovery firm to conclude that "in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives."

The statement comes from a Los Angeles-headquartered HDD, SSD, and RAID data recovery firm aptly named Secure Data Recovery that has been in business since 2007 and claims to have resolved more than 100,000 cases. It studied the HDDs it received in 2022. "Most" of those drives were 40GB to 10TB, according to a blog post by Secure Data Recovery spotted by Blocks & Files on Thursday.

Secure Data Recovery's March 8 post broke down the HDDs it received by engineer-verified "power-on hours," or the total amount of time the drive was functional, starting from when its owner began using it and ending when the device arrived at Secure Data Recovery.

The firm also determined the drives' current pending sector count, depicting "the number of damaged or unusable sectors the hard drive developed during routine read-and-write operations." The company's data doesn't include HDDs that endured non-predictable failures or damage by unexpected events, such as electrical surges, malware, natural disasters, and "accidental mishandling," the company said.

Among the sample, 936 drives are from Western Digital, 559 come from Seagate, 211 are Hitachi brand, 151 are Toshiba's, 123 are Samsung's, and there are 27 Maxtor drives. Notably, 74.5 percent of the HDDs came from either Western Digital or Seagate, which Secure Data Recovery noted accounted for 80 percent of hard drive shipments in 2021, citing Digital Storage Technology Newsletter data shared by Forbes.

Secure Data Recovery also noted unspecified variations from model to model when examining power-on hours and bad sector counts for Western Digital and Seagate drives.

The average time before failure among the sample size was 2 years and 10 months, and the 2,007 defective HDDs had an average of 1,548 bad sectors.

"While 1,548 bad sectors out of hundreds of millions or even billions of disk subdivisions might seem minuscule, the rate of development often increases, and the risk of data corruption multiplies," the blog said.

Secure Data Recovery isn't the only company using its business to look for storage insight. As Blocks & Files pointed out, backup and cloud storage company Backblaze uses hard drives that surpass the average life span Secure Data Recovery saw among the HDDs clients sent it last year. At the end of 2022, Backblaze's 230,921 hard drives had an average age of 3.6 years versus the 2-year, 10-month average time before failure among the drives Secure Data Recovery worked on last year. Obviously, Backblaze's sample size is much larger. Further, its analysis is much more detailed, breaking down HDD failure rate trends model by model. The discrepancies show the challenges in pinpointing exactly when an HDD may fail you and, thus, the importance of data backup.

Older drives show better durability?

If you've been feeling like HDDs aren't built to last as long as they used to be, you're not alone. Secure Data Recovery's blog suggested a relationship between when an HDD was made and how long it lasted before failing.

We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made before 2015. On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015.

Unfortunately, Secure Data Recovery didn't specify what it meant by "most." But it did point to HDD manufacturers pushing the performance envelope as a reason why HDD reliability may have dipped with more recent products. This includes size limits that cut "allowance between moving parts, appearing to affect mechanical damage and wear resistance."

Secure Data Recovery also blamed a three-letter acronym that has nearly become a four-letter word to storage users in 2020: SMR. The revelation that various brands, including Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, clandestinely sold devices with shingled magnetic recording disks instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording) disks shocked consumers, and Western Digital even ended up paying $2.7 million in a class-action lawsuit.

While users were primarily upset that drives leveraging SMR offered slower random write speeds than drives using CMR, Secure Data Recovery also believes that SMR impacts HDD reliability, as the disks place components under "more stress."

Again, we find ourselves with somewhat limited information, as the blog didn't disclose how many drives it tested use CMR disks versus SMR disks. Still, the company argued:

For example, the platter surface of a hard drive with SMR is more complex, given its overlapping tracks. This intricate design leaves the platters more vulnerable to degradation.

In addition to the platter surface, data management of devices with SMR must be considered. Shingled hard drives are either device-managed, host-managed, or host-aware. Improper protocols could impact its performance. Frequent read-and-write operations could lead to logical errors. Excessive, improper use could cause the actuator arm and heads to become worn.

Thus, disks with CMR appear more durable and resilient than those with SMR.

However, as the blog pointed out, there are benefits to new HDDs, too, such as potential performance gains and the inclusion of years-long warranties with most consumer drives.

Again, this is a limited study of a significantly smaller sample size than we’ve seen from the likes of Backblaze, and there are some details missing that could have provided deeper insight (we’ve reached out to Secure Data Recovery about these points and will update this article if we hear back). Still, the firm has provided some analysis of a larger number of drives than the typical consumer can get their hands on, offering food for thought when considering HDD lifespans.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023...ives-suggests/






Why did Top Bollywood Songs Disappear from Spotify?

In today’s Finshots, we explain the larger implications of the Spotify India and Zee Music face-off.
The Story

If you don’t use Spotify to play your music, you might’ve missed something big. A few days ago, a whole bunch of Bollywood songs disappeared from the music streaming service. And if you’d scratched your head a bit to solve the mystery, you would’ve seen a common link — all those missing songs were part of Zee Music’s catalogue.

The reason?

Spotify and Zee Music couldn’t come to a conclusion about how much money all that music was worth. The licensing deal fell through. And people who use Spotify are now left fuming because 12 out of the top 200 songs in India are now unplayable.

Now before we get into the meat of the story, we first need to simplify how the music industry works today.

So you have the artist who harnesses all their creative energy to create songs that we love. But for the artist’s songs to reach people like us, it typically passes through a middleman. This is a gigantic record label like Sony Music or Universal Music Group. They’re the ones with the massive distribution clout and followers. They sign up an artist and promise to promote their music. The label practically owns the music. And in return, the artists get a royalty on the music  whenever someone buys the track.

For a long time, that’s how it worked. But one day in 2008, a Swedish company called Spotify rolled around. They told these music labels that people were simply pirating songs or downloading them illegally. And that’s because no one wanted to buy full albums. They wanted only specific songs. And pirating meant that everyone was losing money.

So Spotify’s pitch was simple. They’d license the catalogue of music owned by the labels. And they’d allow people like you and me to play it on demand. Over the internet. No more pirating because Spotify would give the music for free. They’d run ads and make money. Or charge a subscription fee. And a cut of this would go to the music label and in turn, the artists too.

Even though music labels were circumspect at the start, they eventually came around. And it’s a good thing they did because over 60% of their revenues now come from these streaming services.

So, if music labels stand to make so much money from Spotify, you have to wonder why Zee Music just cut ties with Spotify, right?

In one word — leverage.

You see, unlike the western world where Spotify reigns supreme, that’s just not the case in India. Spotify only made its entry in 2019. And by then, others had taken the top spot. For instance, JioSaavn says that it has over 100 million monthly active users. And it has the added heft of Reliance Jio’s massive telecom user base behind it to become even bigger. There’s also Gaana* — owned by Times Internet — which claims to have crossed 185 million MAUs (Monthy Active Users) in 2020 itself.

But more importantly, there’s YouTube — an app that basically comes preloaded into millions of Android phones that Indians use. And that’s the app the majority of Indians are likely to use for their music fix.

Why’s that, you ask?

Well, don’t forget that songs in India are intrinsically linked to the movies. The song and dance is inherently Indian. And the video is very much a part of the experience. Just think of the uber-popular Naatu Naatu. It wasn’t just the music that hooked people but the dance choreography that accompanied it.

Spotify can’t really replicate that emotion on its audio app, can it?

And when the Indian Music Industry (IMI) ran the numbers last year, 58% of people said that they preferred streaming music on YouTube. A survey from 2019 kind of hammered home this point too. If someone spent 100 minutes listening to songs, 28 minutes would involve watching the video. Globally, that number was just 19 minutes.

The end result is that Zee Music has nearly 94 million subscribers on YouTube. And T-Series has about 240 million subscribers too. Yup, the T-Series channel actually has the most YouTube subscribers across the world.

And with its digital revenue streams nicely diversified, it’s pretty easy for someone like Zee Music to flex its muscles over Spotify. It could easily say that the ₹20–30 crores it probably gets each year isn’t enough. And tell the Swedish company to pony up more money if it wants to realize its grand ambitions in India.

But striking an exorbitantly priced deal could be just half the battle for Spotify in India. Because the big question is — how will Spotify really make money?

Because Indians still like getting their music for free. They’d rather pirate it than pay for it. In fact, nearly 7 out of 10 music ‘lovers’ in India still download music illegally. For context, only 30% of the global music audience indulge in such acts.

Sure, Spotify is doing all it can to lure Indians into the streaming giant’s net. It’s got special mini plans for India — The ‘pay only ₹7 a day using UPI’ kind. It’s hoping that people will see its catalogue of vast music, fall for the cheap daily plan and ignore piracy. But it’s not going to be easy.

And because Spotify knows this, it wants to double down on ads in India. They’ve seen the numbers — the revenue mix for subscriptions and advertising in India stands at 50:50 according to the Economic Times. On the other hand, 90% of global revenues are from paid subscribers.

So ads it is.

But even this isn’t an easy market to crack for audio streaming companies. And if you use the free tier of Spotify like me, you might have noticed that most of the ads seem to be from Spotify itself. To promote their premium subscriptions.

So, where are the real advertisers?

Well, as one article in The Ken put it,

The fight isn’t about whether the advertising monies should go to Spotify or JioSaavn or Gaana right now, it’s more about if the money should go to digital audio at all,” the marketing executive said.

After all, Alphabet and Meta offer an intoxicating mix of consumer data, massive scale, and incisive targeting to advertisers — and music streaming platforms just can’t compete with them.

Basically, advertisers haven’t yet warmed up to the idea of displaying their wares on audio streaming services. And that’s a bummer for Spotify.

At the end of the day, for Spotify to really survive and thrive in India, it needs to massively increase its free user base. Or convince Indians that it’s okay to pay for music. And it can’t do either without the catalogue of one of India’s biggest music labels.

So yeah, Spotify probably needs Zee Music more than Zee Music needs Spotify right now.

Until then…

Don't forget to share this article on WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Twitter

*Zee Music cut ties with Gaana in 2022 too. It definitely looks like the music label is showing everyone who’s the boss, doesn’t it?
https://finshots.in/archive/zee-musi...-with-spotify/





FCC Fines 15 Year-Old Pirate Radio Station in NYC $2 Million

The FCC is using its new powers to ask from the maximum fine from an Ecuadorian pirate radio station that's run for more than 15 years.
Matthew Gault

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is using a new law to fine a pirate radio station operating in New York City for more than $2 million. For 15 years, Impacto 2, which has been operated by two brothers, has broadcast Ecuadorian news, culture, sports, and talk-radio on 105.5 FM in Queens. The feds have tried to shut it down repeatedly, but have never succeeded.

The FCC announced the fine in a press release last week. “The Commission proposed the maximum penalty allowable, $2,316,034, against brothers César Ayora and Luis Angel Ayora for pirate radio broadcasting in Queens, New York,” the release said. The FCC also said it was trying to seize $80,000 in equipment from a man broadcasting pirate radio in Eastern Oregon.

The Ayoras have been on the FCC’s radar since 2008 when they started broadcasting Impacto 2 for the Ecuadorian community in Queens: "The brothers César and [Luis] Angel Ayora in September 2008 founded the first Ecuadorian FM radio station in New York City. . . The station never sleeps, because a team of communication professionals are working for you 24 hours a day," their website, which is currently down, said. The station is broadcast over the internet and has moved around the FM spectrum several times over the years.

The station's Instagram and Facebook pages show that they regularly throw events for the community and that their main mission is providing Spanish-language news and music for Ecuadorians living in Queens.

The FCC closely polices radio spectrums around the country, and provides licenses to companies who apply for specific frequencies. On the one hand, this makes sense, because use of radio frequencies are limited by physics and, without licenses, radio would be a free-for-all. Currently, the FCC is not providing any new FM or AM radio frequencies, according to its website. At the same time, pirate radio has a long history of providing access to the airwaves for independent broadcasters. In this case, the targets of the fine are a pair of brothers who were providing a vital community resource.

In court documents about the fine, the FCC detailed its history with the Ayoras and Impacto 2.

The story is always the same. Someone complains about the Ecuadorian broadcast, the FCC investigates and tracks down the radio antenna, and the Ayoras admit to owning it. Then the FCC issues a fine. “On June 2, 2015, the Bureau issued a $20,000 forfeiture order against Luis Angel Ayora for operating this unauthorized radio station,” court document said “The Bureau received no response to the order, and the forfeiture was never paid.”

After the fine goes unpaid, the FCC seizes the equipment. But the Ayoras don’t stop. “The seizure of their equipment by federal agents did not deter the Ayoras from continuing to operate their pirate radio station,” a court document said.

According to the FCC’s court documents, the Ayoras repeatedly talked about the pirate station on the air and let the audience know when the station changed places on the FM dial. César Ayora even hosts a show called Sentimientos where he plays romantic music every Sunday night. The radio station’s Instagram account explicitly advertises it as airing in New York.

The brothers even kept the pirate radio stations running during the pandemic. The feds noticed but held off on investigating. “COVID-19 travel restrictions prevented further onsite inspections until 2022,” the court record said.

Things changed in 2020, when Congress passed the Preventing Illegal Radio Abuse Through Enforcement (PIRATE) Act. The PIRATE act gave the FCC broader powers to levy fines and seize equipment against accused broadcasters including a penalty of $100,000 a day with a maximum fine of $2 million. “In addition to tougher fines on violators, the law requires the FCC to conduct periodic enforcement sweeps and grants the Commission authority to take enforcement action against landlords and property owners that willfully and knowingly permit pirate radio broadcasting on their properties,” the FCC said in a press release.

According to the FCC, the Ayoras have admitted to operating the radio station several times during interviews. The feds even went to the trouble of totaling every day it could prove the pair had run the radio station and detailed what it would like to charge them for it. “Based on the severity of the facts underlying these factors, we propose the maximum penalty of $115,80265 for each day of the 184 days during which the Ayoras operated their pirate radio station in 2022 for a total penalty of $21,307,568,” the FCC’s court documents said.

That is, however, not possible under the new PIRATE Act. “We reduce the proposed penalty from $21,307,568 to $2,316,034 based on the statutory limits imposed by section 511(a) of the Act,” it said in court documents.

All of this said, the FCC may have trouble finding the Ayoras. On February 19, a month before the FCC announced the fine, Luis Angel Ayora posted a picture of himself on Facebook in front of a lush green mountain. “The person who guesses the location gets a guinea pig,” he said in the caption.

Impacto 2 did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93k5...ollar2-million





Starlink Rival OneWeb Poised for Global Coverage After Weekend Launch

India's space agency plans to launch 36 OneWeb satellites on Sunday, completing the British company's first internet constellation. Watch it live right here.
Passant Rabie

British satellite company OneWeb is gearing up for the launch of its final batch of internet satellites, completing a constellation in low Earth orbit despite some hiccups along the way.

India’s heaviest launch vehicle LVM-3 will carry 36 OneWeb satellites, with liftoff slated for Sunday at 11:30 p.m. ET, according to OneWeb. The launch will take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, marking OneWeb’s second deployment from India. You can watch the launch at the livestream below.
https://youtu.be/bIKIzl-h3Qo

After having to cancel its launches aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket, OneWeb turned to the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to launch its satellites using India’s heaviest rocket. In October 2022, the 143-foot-tall (43.5 meter) rocket launched with its first commercial payload, the first batch of 36 OneWeb satellites, on board.

OneWeb has been building an internet constellation in low Earth orbit since 2020, and it currently consists of 579 functioning satellites, according to statistics kept by Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. The addition of 36 new units will raise the population of the constellation to 615, completing the first orbital shell. The company had originally planned on building a 648-unit constellation, but it says this final launch will cap it off and allow for global coverage.

The company ran into some difficulties last year when it was forced to halt the launch of its satellites after terminating its contract with Russia’s space agency Roscosmos.

After relying on Russia’s Soyuz rocket to launch its satellites, OneWeb’s relationship with Roscosmos quickly deteriorated following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In retaliation against the Western sanctions imposed against Russia, Roscosmos refused to launch OneWeb’s satellites unless the company agreed to a list of demands. OneWeb declined, prompting Russia to keep OneWeb’s 36 satellites at a storage facility in Baiknour, Kazakhstan.

The company was left scrambling to find alternative rides for its satellites. As a result, OneWeb signed contracts with its internet constellation rival SpaceX, as well as ISRO, for the six remaining launches required for its first generation satellites.

Sunday’s launch will complete OneWeb’s constellation, enabling it to initiate global coverage this year, according to the company. Hopefully the company will be able to recover from last year’s setback, and move on from those 36 satellites still being held hostage by Russia.
https://gizmodo.com/starlink-spacex-...age-1850262880





Librarians, CT Lawmakers Fight Against High Cost of eBooks
Ken Dixon

Connecticut librarians say they are victims of price-gouging by book publishers whose charges for eBooks are as much as five times the amount of traditional books.

Other contractual restrictions, which librarians are fighting in the General Assembly with the assistance of bipartisan support from lawmakers, limit the use of individual eBooks for a maximum of two years or 26 "borrows." And unlike inter-library loans of traditional hard and paperbacks, eBooks are limited in use to individual libraries.

A bill that would end many of the contract restrictions won unanimous approval last week in the legislative Planning and Development Committee, following recent public hearings that brought librarians from around the state to complain about the expensive landscape. A similar bill awaits action in the Government Administration & Elections Committee. Opposition has been led by the Association of American Publishers, who say the proposal is unconstitutional and would deprive authors of royalties.

Ellen Paul, executive director of the Connecticut Library Consortium, said in a Monday interview that the publishers' argument seems to be based on unrelated legislation that was overturned in Maryland and was vetoed in New York last year.

"I don't think the publishers have read the bills in Connecticut," Paul said. "What we're doing here in Connecticut is contract law. The Connecticut legislature has purview over contracts in Connecticut. We have procurement law to ensure taxpayer dollars are used properly." The legislation would allow librarians to set new contract terms for eBooks. "We're saying if you would like to participate, these are the terms and conditions. It's like the Connecticut DOT paying six times more for asphalt than a general contractor and every two years seeing the road disappear."

State librarians do not purchase eBooks from publishers, but from platforms for the books under digital rights and protections. "Publishers have refused to negotiate with libraries over the last 20 years," Paul said in a phone interview. Popular titles such as the Harry Potter young magicians' series have to be repurchased every two years or after 26 instances of borrowing.

Also, eBooks are not allowed to be in the traditional interlibrary loan program. Paul said that 82 percent of available eBooks are under the metered copy model.

"The cost of eBooks are so high, we don't buy as many," Paul said. "Libraries want to buy more books. We want to get books into the hands of every one. If libraries could buy more, authors would make more money."

According to the State Library, between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022, state residents borrowed 11.8 million physical materials, including printed books, books on CD; and 3.4 million electronic books and downloadable audio books. Electronic circulation as a percentage of overall circulation was 7.5 percent in 2017, jumping to 17.1 percent in 2020 and peaking at 23.9 percent in 2021 at the height of the pandemic. In 2022 it fell back to 17.9 percent.

During a recent public hearing on the issue, Alice S. Knapp, the CEO of the Ferguson Library in Stamford, which introduced eBooks in the early 2000s, said that the average wait time for a popular eBook could be 40 days.

"If the book is popular or part of a series, we then need to lease it all over again," Knapp said. "In a state that has a long tradition of resource sharing, these leased titles are only available to local residents. We cannot loan a title to someone who lives in another town and vice versa."

Both Republicans and Democrats on the Planning and Development Committee agreed it is time to redraw contract terms.

"This bill is absolutely critical to our towns," said state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, D-Simsbury, co-chairwoman of the committee. "It is unconscionable to me that I can buy a book, a best-seller for say $10 or $14 when I use a Kindle or an iPad, but libraries that are only get to get two years or 26 uses out of a book that they purchased to make available to patrons online, they're going to pay sometimes five times what that best-seller cost. This is limiting them in the number of books they can purchase. It's limiting them in the expansion of an online library. I think the more that people learn about this situation, the more-outraged they become about just how these publishing companies are really hurting the towns."

"It is about fundamental fairness," said Rep. Joseph Zullo, R-East Haven.

"This legislation wouldn't have been necessary if the publishers weren't charging such ridiculous rates for these books," said Sen. Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, who along with Zullo is a top Republican on the committee. "I didn't go into this bill expecting to support it necessarily, but the prices on the eBooks are so ridiculously high and orders of magnitude higher than the physical books, this legislation wouldn't be advanced if they just were acting in a more reasonable fashion. And I am a major free-market guy."
https://www.newstimes.com/politics/a...s-17849256.php

















Until next week,

- js.



















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