The Universal Library Card

“The Universal Library Card”

Dear Random House,

I’ve been following the recent flap over Google’s plan to create a searchable Internet database of copyrighted books. I understand why you and other publishers are angry at Google, and I suppose that as a professional novelist, I should be angry at them too. But here’s the funny thing: the more I think about it, the more I realize that I want what Google is proposing.*

I’m not just a writer, you see. I’m also an avid reader. I’ve spent a significant amount of my life at the public library. And to have the equivalent of the public library in my own home, accessible twenty-four hours a day, with no reserve lists or late fees, would be a dream come true. If making that dream a reality meant giving other people free access to my own books, I’d consider that a small price to pay.

Of course, this is your objection: you think it’s too small a price to pay. If people are allowed to read books for free, you wonder, how will you make any money?

Would it be too obvious to point out that public library patrons are some of your best customers? It’s a rare year when I don’t spend at least two thousand dollars on books, and if I weren’t a poor starving artist, I’d spend a lot more. Many of the books I buy are books I’ve already read, for free, either at the library or at my local bookstore (which offers comfy chairs and coffee along with unlimited browsing). I read the books, I fall in love with them, I decide I have to have them. I open my wallet.

OK, so you think I’m a freak. Maybe addicts like me will still pay when we don’t have to, but you are unwilling to trust other readers to take that last step. You want to charge something up front, so that you don’t end up giving away the store.

Your position is not unreasonable. But the business plan you’ve come up with is. According to a recent New York Times story [“Want ‘War and Peace’ Online?”, Nov. 4, 2005], “The Random House model calls for consumers to be able to buy access to a book for, say, 5 cents a page...”

At five cents a page, access to an entire 500-page novel would cost twenty-five dollars. That’s a hardcover price. I know I’m not alone in feeling that if I pay hardcover prices, I ought to get an actual book out of it—one that I can hold in my hands, loan to my friends, and sell to a used bookstore if I decide I don’t want it anymore. A bundle of copy-protected electrons isn’t worth nearly that much.

Your pricing scheme for reference works is even more unrealistic: “25 cents a page, for cookbooks and other specialty publications...” Dream on. No one is going to pay you a quarter to download a recipe when they can just use Google to find one of the millions of free recipes that are already out there. If I want Alton Brown’s new cookbook—and I do—I’m not going to pay for it a page at a time, I’ll buy the whole thing at once.

Which brings me to my point. Your pay-per-page scheme is never going to work. A pay-per-book plan might work, if you did it right, but you won’t: you’ll charge too much, and fear of piracy will lead you to place aggravating restrictions on what your customers can do with their purchases. My suggestion? Forget about selling the online library piecemeal, and instead come up with a way to sell the whole thing at once.

Sell me a Universal Library Card. For one fee, give me access to everything: your books, your competitors’ books, and the public domain stuff too. Charge me ten bucks a month. Heck, charge me twenty. (But don’t get greedy; the real library is just down the block, and admission there is still free). Let me in, and let me browse to my heart’s content—I’ll bring my own comfy chair and brew the coffee myself.

Oh yeah, and don’t bother with copy protection.** We’ve already established that people who want to read books for free can do so—legally—so why waste time and money pretending that’s not true? Instead, focus on making it easier and cheaper for patrons of the Universal Library to buy physical copies of the virtual books they fall in love with. I’ll buy lots of them, I promise.

And if this thing catches on, who knows? Maybe publishers won’t be the only ones to make money off the deal. Maybe we authors will, too.

*Actually, I wanted what I thought Google was proposing. When I wrote this, I was under the impression that the Google Library allowed you to read entire copyrighted books online. In reality, while you can search entire books, the Library will only display a small portion of copyrighted texts. While still useful, this is far less cool than a true online library, and the reduced cool factor makes publishers’ opposition to it all the more baffling.

**Subsequent experience with Rhapsody has convinced me that online copy protection can be made to work in a way that isn’t hopelessly annoying. But I still question its necessity in most cases.

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