From Hannes Eder’s Literary Platform essay about the Swedish model for settling the dispute between publishers and libraries in the age of e-book lending:

“Again and again e-books just won’t behave like their print counterparts. And not only when it comes to libraries for that matter; when you click the ‘buy now’ button on Amazon the fine print shows what’s really going on.  The following comes from the Kindle store’s Terms of Use:

‘Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.’

If treating ebooks like physical books is beginning to feel a bit like trying to push a square peg through a round hole, that feeling is confirmed by the the letter of the law. In a legal sense e-books aren’t goods. That’s why the right of first sale-doctrine doesn’t apply to them, which in plain English means that you can’t do what you want with an e-book just because you payed for it. Instead e-books are considered services, and services are licensed on terms that need to be negotiated between the licensor and the licensee. That’s why libraries and publishers now need to sit down to negotiate, where before there was really no need to talk.

Some say the war over e-books can’t be solved since libraries lack enough of a value proposition to make publishers even want to sit down at the table. New York-based business analyst Mike Shatzkin has made this point, and perhaps it holds true in America where the war is raging most ferociously and where none of the biggest publishers are now making their full e-book catalogs available to libraries.

But what’s true in America doesn’t have to be true in Europe, which the example of Sweden clearly shows.

Sweden has a long tradition of building community based cultural infrastructure that is controlled in full neither by the state nor by private interest. To mention just one of many examples: Ingmar Bergman probably wouldn’t have had such a tremendous reach if he hadn’t been backed by the Swedish Film Institute, in which the private film industry pools its resources together with state money.

The book industry is no different. Just over a decade ago publishers and librarians formed a joint task force that came up with a model for e-book lending which still to this day seems unique in the world: transaction fees for every loan; no cap on the number of concurrent loans; and access to full catalogs without entry fees. In short, e-books are treated as services.”