"Owning" e-books

The basic aspiration of the LOCKSS Program when we started a quarter century ago was to enable libraries to continue their historical mission of collecting, preserving, and providing readers with access to academic journals. In the paper world libraries which subscribed to a journal owned a copy; in the digital world they could only rent access to the publisher's copy. This allowed the oligoply academic publishers to increase their rent extraction from research and education budgets.

LOCKSS provided a cheap way for libraries to collect, preserve and provide access to their own copy of journals. The competing e-journal preservation systems accepted the idea of rental; they provided an alternate place from which access could be rented if it were denied by the publisher.

Similarly, libraries that purchased a paper book owned a copy that they could loan to readers. The transition to e-books meant that they were only able to rent access to the publisher's copy, and over time the terms of this rental grew more and more onerous.

Below the fold I look into a recent effort to mitigate this problem.