I wanted to say something about Meredith’s and Sarah’s provocative posts, Has EBSCO become the new evil empire? (Meredith), Unethical Library Vendors: A Call to Arms for Libraries to Fight Back (Sarah), and A lot of Davids make one heck of a Goliath (Mer, again). But the more I thought about it, the more uncertain I became. So rather than try and make sense of it, here are a bunch of ideas, numbered not as a logical sequence, but to make them easier to refer to. Some of these ideas I might actually believe, when I’m not believing the ideas that contradict them.

Henry Fuseli’s Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis

1. Cory Doctorow says you shouldn’t buy an iPad if you care about your mom and freedom and stuff. This idea should have at least some resonance for librarians who historically have been interested in free access to and dissemination of information.

2. People who buy an iPad and jailbreak it will be part of the problem and not the solution. People who buy an iPad and then complain about the closed environment are delusional and easily distracted. Collection development librarians are caught between the Scylla of powerful patron needs and desires and the Charybdis of vendor pricing, bundling, licensing, and so forth.

3. As a rule, academic patrons (faculty and staff) are very interested in access to the literature and very disinterested in the relationship between authors, journals, publishers, databases, vendors, and libraries. It is this disconnect between what is wanted (instant access to a particular work) and what we have to license (access to big bundles of “content”) that is the crux of the problem.

4. I don’t really think Apple or EBSCO or any of these companies are doing anything “unethical” when they bundle content or create unfriendly licenses, or negotiate exclusive deals. I think that their business interests conflict with the interests of some of their customers, and these controversies make those disconnects plain. Libraries and vendors do not have the same goal.

5. I do think calling a person’s supervisor because of a blog post she wrote is sleazy, hostile, and wrong. Send me the names of those reps and I will call them (not their supervisors) myself to tell them so. EDIT: No need to send me his name, because Sam Brooks, the Senior VP of Sales and Marketing for EBSCO, called me himself today. He’s the guy who called Meredith’s boss, and he says he did so because he wanted to talk to the library’s EBSCO contact (i.e., Meredith’s boss) about their options for getting the journal they wanted with just one database subscription, instead of two, as Meredith had thought. I think he is sincere. So I’ll scratch “sleazy” and “hostile” and say “ill-advised” and “undiplomatic.” He should have called Meredith first, pled his case, then let her know that he’d be calling the library’s official contact next.

6. Libraries are hindered in any negotiations with “content providers,” because we aren’t their real customers. Library patrons are their customers and we write the checks.

7. Meredith wants to see libraries band together and use our collective weight. Others remind us that mass boycotts might run afoul of racketeering laws. I wonder if a better approach than boycotts and protests would be a way to encourage good behavior. How about an agreement among libraries that certain contract provisions or corporate actions are unconscionable and we will no longer sign contracts containing those provisions? How about a list of practices that we prefer, which would give a vendor an edge in competition if they adhered to those practices? And how about the biggest groups in the library world (I’m thinking of ARL for academic libraries) getting behind such an act?

8. Really though, why should libraries worry about solving this issue? Can’t we just make the best decisions we can with the money we have, and let the chips fall where they may? When you lose access to something important because a Big Vendor signs an exclusive deal with a single journal, shouldn’t you direct complaints from patrons to the journal? The less we work around these problems the better. Let the journal feel the pain of fewer readers and citations. Let the researchers feel the pain of waiting for ILL. Refuse to apologize or mitigate crises that you did not create.

9. Some “content” (look, I’m sorry for the scare quotes, I just hate the word “content”) is big enough that it can always take its ball and go home. Notice how the Beatles still aren’t on iTunes? Nature and Science will always be able to do whatever damn fool thing they want.

10. If I were the head of EBSCO, I’d likely be following the same business strategy which they are right now. I’m not sure why I should care much if librarians start to hate my company and a few bloggers make some noise about it, as long as the people in charge felt that they couldn’t cancel their subscriptions. I’d be responsible to my employees and my board and owners, and I could live with librarians saying “we hate you” as long as the renewals kept rolling in. Librarians need a more compelling story than “we hate you.” We need “as soon as this [very likely and very immanent] thing happens, we will all scrape you off our shoes and never look back.”