Today, the disturbing news that is going around is that some publishers have asked Overdrive (the library lending program) to limit the number of checkouts for a digital lending license.

Look, I get that money is tight. I get that you’re worried about an infinite number of checkouts from one digital copy. I get that you’re projecting the future and it’s filled with fear. What I don’t get, however, is the utter disdain for the vital role that libraries fill in our community, and in the book-buying ecosystem.

So let’s talk about the lifecycle of a voracious reader: me.

I enjoyed reading from a very young age. I started forming lifelong habits at the age of ten, and continued through my twenties. It quickly became apparent that the sources of books available to me were vastly, vastly inadequate. My parents didn’t have a lot of discretionary income (having opted for discretionary children instead). We had a lot of books in the house, but a house that has 1,000 books in it is nothing–you finish most of those 1,000 books by the time you are 9 or 10, and that’s including the hours you spend struggling through “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” because damn, there really isn’t anything else to read.

We got most of our additional reading through the library. We would go every week during the summer, and we’d each check out the maximum number of books. (Which I think was three or four). I would finish my own books on the first day of the week, and then swap with my sister. By the end of the week, we were all slavering, waiting for my little brother to finish his latest Hardy Boys book.

When I went away to college, I had to bend over backwards to keep my fiction reading up. I read everything I could find in the library. I borrowed from friends. On occasion, when I couldn’t bear to wait on the library waiting list for a new release, I would take the money for the book I wanted from my food budget–but since I was spending $15 a week on food, this was not always an option. Back then, I was willing to jump through the most enormous hoops to get books for free: begging, borrowing from people I barely knew, waiting for weeks on the library waiting list. I was more than willing to trade free time (which I had in spades) for books.

Since that time, my discretionary income has increased substantially, and my free time has decreased accordingly.

When I was young, and forming habits, and had no money, I could get free books. If I had not been able to get free books, I would have eventually found other ways to pass my time. Video games, role playing, television… you name it, there are a ton of other free or near-free habits I could, and would, have developed.

Today, library budgets are being slashed. Some publishers don’t make their books available for digital lending, and more publishers are actively hostile.

But let’s face the truth: libraries are an annoying way to get books. You have to wait. You have to read the book on someone else’s schedule–when you hit your spot–and you only have two weeks to read it before it’s ripped from your grasp, and later on, when you can’t remember the title or the author you can’t scour your shelves in vain.

A lend from a library is never as good as a purchase. People do it because they are readers, and they put up with it because it is really, really expensive to support a flat-out voracious reading habit on your own dime.

Publishers, if you make it impossible for young people–those in the “under 25″ category–to support a good reading habit on their own dime, these people are not going to start magically spending money on books when they start making a decent income. No; at that point, they’ll already have started spending their time haunting hulu instead, where they can actually get free entertainment. And when they start making money, they’ll be buying iTunes streams of those shows they watched for free.

Me, personally, I’d rather they were buying books.

When I was 20, I spent maybe $50 a year on books. Libraries subsidized my reading for 10 years of my life. But once I started having a reasonable income, the tables turned. I imagine that I’ll be spending over $5,000 a year on books–what I spent last year–every year for the rest of my life.

Libraries are the future of reading. When the economy is down, we need to make it easier for people to buy and read books for free, not harder. It is stupid to sacrifice tomorrow’s book buyers for today’s dollars, especially when it’s obvious that the source in question doesn’t have any more dollars to give you.

Mike Shatzkin has an interesting post in which he makes the claim that (1) readers never own an e-book; they just own a license, and therefore (2) readers should stop complaining about DRM and the lack of the right of first sale, things that are “silly conversations” in the digital world.

The second point first: Shatzkin’s post is an exercise in circular logic, because the legal intricacies of license versus ownership are totally irrelevant to the questions he purportedly dismisses.

It is not enough to say “an e-book is only licensed.” Licenses have content that restrict use. There is no magical default license language in the sky–publishers and distributors set the terms of the license. If the publisher says, “you may not lend your e-books,” the license that the reader gets does not allow lending. If the publisher says, “you may lend your e-books,” lo and behold, lending is allowed.

It begs the question (note the correct use of the phrase, please) to say that readers should not complain about DRM because they have a license. Why the heck can’t readers complain about a license, when the terms of that license are dictated by the publisher? Even assuming that Shatzkin is right about the license/ownership debate, why is it a “silly conversation” to talk about the terms of the license? It’s not silly to complain when you are paying more for books where you receive fewer rights.

Saying “because it’s a license” doesn’t answer any of those questions. It just tells you why you have the questions in the first place. The question of license versus sale is irrelevant to the question of the content of the license. It is never a silly question for consumers to say to producers, “We would like a different license, please.”

There should be a name for the logical fallacy of equating “legal” with “unarguable,” but in an event, that’s what Shatzkin is doing.

Now we come to the second count: Shatzkin basically asserts that you don’t own your e-book; you merely have a license to use it. This is a categorical claim that does not track the (still unsettled) law on the question. As a note, I think Shatzkin is confusing ownership of the copyright with ownership of a copy.

To make the distinction clear: I own a copy of this paper book that I am holding in my hand. (It happens to be Tiffany Clare’s The Seduction of his Wife, in case you’re wondering.) I bought it at the store. Buying that copy gave me certain rights: the right to read it, to read it aloud, to give it away on my blog, to lend it to a friend, to resell it to someone else. I have the right to make an archival copy for personal use. I own a copy.

I do not own the copyright, nor do I have a license to distribute. That means that I cannot make photocopies of the book and distribute or sell them.

Now, let me start this off by saying that I have never seen anything that suggests that you cannot sell a digital copy. If anyone can point me to that, I’d love to see it. It’s true, however, that most sellers would prefer to license digital copies. This is because the seller retains more control that way. But no person can categorically state that all e-books are merely licensed and not sold. If you want to know if you have a license or a sale, you have to look at how the item in question is transferred. In Vernor v. Autodesk, the Ninth Circuit explained:

A software user is a licensee rather than an owner of a copy where the copyright owner (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions.

(For reference purposes, the Ninth Circuit falls on the “more likely to read as a license” bit of the license/ownership debate; this debate is not over by any means.)

Under this standard, I suspect at least some of the e-books I have purchased are in fact sales and not licenses. It’s also quite clear to me that nobody can say, “you didn’t buy your e-books!” without looking at the terms of the transfer. And someone who says, “Gosh, we’re all calling them sales, and that’s wrong!” needs to look at factor (1) in the standard above and ask, “If we are calling them sales, can they actually be licenses?”

Of course, my analysis doesn’t mean that we must perish under Shatzkin’s parade of horribles, in which one person buys one copy and then transfers it to infinity and beyond. The transfer of the digital copy requires you to effectively make a copy–something you can’t do with a print copy–and it’s an open question whether that is allowed for owners of a copy. You’d probably have to have a license to do that.