The e-book war in Denmark

Abstract

The aim is to investigate how digitisation and in particular e-books have changed relations between private players and public institutions within the Danish book world through a case study of eReolen, a private-public partnership functioning as common platform for public libraries’ lending of e-books in Denmark. Traditional and new models of the book world are discussed as the basis of understanding relations between the players. A new way of analysing the field outlined by literary sociologist, Professor Johan Svedjedal, is adopted. The main conclusions are that the lending of e-books has disrupted the traditional understanding and interaction between the public library system and the commercial book market. In addition, the Danish library system through the partnership has taken on a new function in relation to the commercial market, namely acting as the engine in building a market for Danish e-books.

Keywords

E-book copyright models of the book world public libraries publishing public-private partnerships

Models of the book world

Traditionally, the materiality of the book world is studied as a book production cycle. Usually it is depicted with focus on individuals or rather institutions, which in some cases (e.g. authors) are identical with individuals.¹ Typically, these models demonstrate a cycle within a print culture whereby a manuscript is transformed into a book that facilitates the reading experience. Robert Escarpit (1972: 13) first described it as a ‘communications circuit’ that makes use of an ‘extremely complex transmission apparatus’. The Swedish professor, Lars Furuland, called his model ‘the literary process’ (Furuland and Svedjedal, 1997: 40f – model originally published in 1970). In the 1980s and 1990s a lively debate took place concerning the ‘right’ model for the study of the book.

Figure 1.

Robert Darnton’s model of the publishing communications circuit.

Robert Darnton’s model from ‘What is the history of books’ (1982), depicted in Figure 1, focuses on institutions first and the book second because his main area is book history, whereas Adams and Barker’s (1993) new model, called ‘the book cycle’, inverts this and puts the book first because their focus is more on society’s impact on the book. Furthermore, they incorporate long-term preservation of books in their model. John Sutherland (1988: 574) has described the situation very accurately in ‘Publishing history: A hole in the centre of literary sociology’ by stating that the main problem within the research field was ‘scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities’. He finds that ‘one of the things that makes literary sociology so easy to do at the moment is that we don’t know enough to make it difficult‘, and he concludes that a new theoretical base founded on extensive knowledge about book trade and publishing is needed (Sutherland 1988: 588).

Whatever model used, a major obstacle, especially in Scandinavian countries, has been to fit in the public institutions, especially the library system² since all models are based on the players or institutions of the commercial market. Some have just left it out (e.g. Darnton, 1982) and some have reduced it to ‘long-term preservation of books’ (e.g. Adams and Barker, 1993), but few have pinned it as both long-term preservation and public distribution of contemporary books. Furuland attempted this by placing libraries together with educational institutions etc. after the ‘commercial distribution’ as ‘Distribution II’, which he characterised as ‘less commercial in nature’ (Furuland and Svedjedal, 1997: 40–41 – my translation).

Since the 1970s, however, cultural theory has pointed out that formal institutions as the basis of the organisation of modern western cultures are being phased out in favour of formations, i.e. a more temporary, one-issue oriented and less hierarchical structuring of cultural life (e.g. Williams, 1977: 119). No one has doubted that also within the book world digitisation has contributed massively to dissociating the content from the material form or medium and the function or task from the player; thus relaxing the institutional organisation of the book world and the fixed order of the literary process or publishing communications circuit. E-books or rather e-paper have been characterised as a disruptive innovation (Forge and Blackman, 2009: 11) and cultural economist Françoise Benhamou (2015: 125) has stated that e-books tend to disintegrate the publishing value chain.

Johan Svedjedal actually dedicated his book The Literary Web (2000) to this end and outlined a new way of analysing the book market based on the tasks or functions in book trade. He stressed that different individuals and institutions often perform the same function and that digitisation gives scope for new groups to create new professions, thus competing with established agents in the book world (Svedjedal, 2000: 130).

Petra Söderlund (2009) gave a perfect illustration of this point concerning authors in her article, ‘Författarna och den digitala världen’ (Authors and the digital world), which she started by deconstructing the term ‘author’. Even though her aim was to re-establish the institution with new rules appropriate to the digital world, the deconstruction made it all too clear how the institution ‘author’ is challenged by digitisation. Anyone posting anything on the Internet can call her- or himself an author.

Still, Svedjedal (2000: 173) fitted neither the ‘analogue’ nor the public players into his new model, which he only illustrated with a few private enterprises made possible by the Internet: homepage publishing, books-on-demand, Amazon.com, Bokus.com (Swedish Internet bookstore) and swnet.kultur.litteratur (literary subdivision of a Swedish Internet news group. Possibly, the problem is that it is no longer possible to outline a comprehensive model of the book world – if it ever was. Benhamou (2015: 125) states that there is no evidence of a sustainable new working model for the digitised trade book market, even if it seems to be evolving within the academic and scientific segments. Murray and Squires (2013) have recently attempted to revise Darnton’s theoretical model by both updating his original model and supplementing it with two new models concerning self-publishing and digital publishing, respectively. This attempt, however admirable, very clearly shows that such models have their limitations. One needs at least three or four models to capture all the different ways in which books in the digital age are produced and distributed and thus the models do not give the much-needed overview.

Public libraries and literary politics

Svedjedal (2000) has analysed the functions of the public library system but has only included the traditional public institution in his analysis: ‘Compared to other agents in the book trade, the library’s main function is to act as spacious archive, holding both new books and older ones which are out of print’ (p. 124). In this way he agrees with Adams and Barker, even though he points out that library functions also include powerful selection, display, lending to the public and ‘various important tasks for the dissemination of the culture of reading’ (p. 124).

Public libraries – as opposed to the former circulating or rental libraries – have traditionally functioned ‘on top’ of a fundamentally private book market where entrepreneurs such as authors, publishers, booksellers etc. produce and distribute books in a free, liberal market. They have been secondary to the market in that they of course cannot function without the book market, whereas the market can function without the libraries. That the libraries are public means that their value is not primarily measured in financial terms but rather by whether they fulfil the cultural policy objectives for their activities. Most scholars characterise cultural policy from the perspective of a citizen-state relationship, from which the Danish cultural policy aim may be summarised as promotion of ‘art and culture with a view to ensuring artistic freedom and cultural democracy’ (Duelund, 2008: 7). In Mulcahy’s (2001: 4) words the Nordic social-democratic model of cultural policy ‘guarantees access to national cultural treasures without the impediment of class, education, or place of habitation’. When viewing the book world from the perspective of the market one might frame Danish cultural policy as a corrective to adverse consequences of market mechanisms (Worsøe-Schmidt, 1999: 5).

The Danish tradition for public support of art and culture is even older than the Danish democracy itself and as early as 1850, Denmark’s first culture minister, L. Madvig, said that if Denmark was to have a national literature of its own, the government had to support it due to the small size of the population. This still applies as the Danish population counts about only 5.5 million people and, of course, any book market is limited by its language boundary. Books in Danish are only interesting for a Danish speaking public. A Danish book, of course, may reach an international book market but then it has to be translated and published by a publisher in that or those countries leaving diminished profits to the original author and publisher. A normal print run for Danish books is about 2000–3000 copies. Traditionally, only the first and last parts of the communications circuit are subsidised, namely authors through grants and the public through the library system.

Often, the public library system is referred to as ‘the cornerstone of Danish cultural policy’. The first library act was passed in 1920 and since the 1964 revision every Danish local authority is required to maintain a public library with departments for children and adults. Although locally based, the public libraries traditionally have acted as one body with respect to books. This means, for instance, that the selection of books is very uniform across the country and that library services in all are more dependent on the size of the library – and thus the municipality – than on the geographical location or social composition of the district (Japsen, 1992: 114; Japsen and Hein, 1994: 145ff; Secher, 2000: 74). Digitisation has reinforced this trend to uniformity (see Folkebibliotekerne i vidensamfundet (Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society), 2010: 8; for more information in English about the basic structure of the Danish public library system see Svane-Mikkelsen, 1997 and Thorhauge, 2002).

On a national level the library system was overseen by the Danish National Library Authority, later the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media, which from 2012 was merged with the Danish Agency for Arts into the Danish Agency for Culture. Under the leadership of the director general at the time, Jens Thorhauge, it has been a very active force within the public library system. He has characterised the Danish National Library Authority as:

… an inter-disciplinary public and research library institution, entrusted with tasks which in other countries often fall to the national library, and as such can effectively be described as unique in the world. At the beginning of the 21 century, the institution sees it as its major objective to ensure the development of a national cooperative library system based on a continuous quantitative and qualitative growth in electronic services as well as the development of services in the physical library room’. (Thorhauge, 2002:12)

Since the 1990s, the public library system’s legitimacy has been severely challenged both by digitisation of information and books and by the development of the quality concept.

The principles for acquisition of materials were termed as quality, topicality and versatility, and the purpose was to let the materials function in relation to free democratic opinion-shaping and to prevent political, religious or moral criteria having any undue influence on the purchase of library materials. The practicalities in connection with an implementation of the quality concept have provoked intense discussion in the Danish library world – over the past few years very much encouraged by publishers and authors who experience that they are selling fewer copies, particularly of the so-called ‘narrow’ or ‘quality’ fiction. (Thorhauge, 2002: 15)

As still more information seeking is carried out outside libraries and books are borrowed from home via the Internet, Danish newspapers have regularly opened their columns to prophecies that predict the early death of public libraries. The quality concept has gradually changed from what experts think the public needs to what the public itself actually wants. In its turn, this has changed library selection of materials towards greater orientation to public demand. Consequently, detective stories and other best-sellers take up more space on library shelves and in loans (Jochumsen and Hvenegaard Rasmussen, 2006: 185ff).

The current self-image of the public library system can be deduced from the recent library report Folkebibliotekerne i videnssamfundet (2010, summary in English: Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society. Summary from the Committee on Public Libraries in the Knowledge Society) that expresses the legitimacy of public libraries as ‘society’s last non-commercial meeting place which the majority of the population uses’ (p. 7). Public libraries no longer have to be different from their commercial counterparts, the bookstore or the streaming service, when it comes to what books, music, movies, or computergames they offer. The main value is that public libraries offer a ‘third space’, to use Ray Oldenburg’s term.

To identify more specifically how the public library system traditionally has interacted with the commercial book market, one could use a modified version of Porter’s (1985) value chain analysis and ask how the public library system has added value to and subtracted value from the book market. Porter’s main idea is to view a company’s activities as a chain of value-adding. Every activity performed within the company or by any supporting companies in the larger stream of the ‘value system’ adds value to the product. The analysis identifies costs and value drivers for each value activity. When used in this context, of course, only the general idea of value-adding is adopted. Furthermore, the notion of value subtraction is incorporated.

Value subtraction is obvious in that free lending competes with commercial sales of books. Most of the value-adding is indirect and not especially visible from the traditional market players’ viewpoints (cf. Giblin and Weatherall 2015: 5). Selecting, displaying and disseminating reading culture do not add immediate financial value to the book market as a whole or to any of its players, although these activities might be adding financial value in the long term by encouraging more people to become readers or to read more extensively or to expand their range of reading, etc. This function is not entirely ignored by Danish publishers, as they tend only to invest in marketing for what Thompson calls ‘big books’, that is, what the publishers believe have a chance of becoming best-sellers. Instead of doing their own advertising in relation to other books they rely heavily on reviews and other coverage in newspapers, magazines and online sites of which the Danish library system operates a well-functioning one, called ‘Litteratursiden.dk’ (The Literary Page).

As a ‘spacious archive’ as Svedjedal calls it, or maybe rather a large repository however, the library system has added very perceptible financial value to the market by extensive purchases of books. In the Danish book trade’s heyday, around 1980, public libraries would purchase the equivalent of a normal first print run of any title of reasonable quality (Folkebibliotekerne i vidensamfundet, 2010: 106), and they annually circulated around 25 volumes per head of population (Dansk kultur-statistik / Danish cultural statistics 1970–85, 1987: 84). The Danish reading culture, including publishing, bookselling, and library lending, peaked around 1980 due partly to the heavy investments in education and public libraries of the welfare state, partly to the huge success of the Danish book clubs. Publishers still look back on the 1970s as a glorious period when they could sell almost any book. This was the time when advanced books were popular. Both sales and loans started decreasing in the 1980s mainly due to increased competition from other media, including television as both cable and satellite TV were introduced and later the market was opened for private enterprise.

At the time, the industry did not recognise this value-adding, not only to the publishing industry but also to retailers. As the public library book collection is required to meet standards of not only quality and comprehensiveness but also topicality, publishers argued that free lending damaged the ‘ecology’ of the book market because the public had access to even the newest titles free of charge. The argument, of course, was reversed when libraries cut book purchase in favour of other materials such as music, movies and later computer games, etc.

Until 2011, Danish cultural policy aimed at the book world also included the book industry through a cultural justification for an exemption from the Competition Act. The exemption, which from 2001 was gradually phased out, allowed the industry vertical cooperation based on the so-called ‘trade rules’, whose foundation was the publishers’ obligations to provide books to all connected booksellers, booksellers’ exclusive rights to market the books and fixed net prices. This meant that public libraries purchased most of their books at local bookstores, thus providing them with a stable turnover. As the book market was liberalised, most libraries abandoned the local bookstores and turned to large-scale operations where library co-operatives handle the purchase and select suppliers through competitive bidding.

Book market

The assumption that forms the basis for Danish cultural policy aimed at the book world, including grants for authors and public libraries for readers, has always been that the commercial production and distribution, i.e. publishers and booksellers, work very well under normal market conditions. Contrary to this, the Danish government early on has been aware that authors, particularly of ‘quality’ literature, both fiction and non-fiction, have difficulty obtaining an acceptable income from their writing. The far-reaching changes in market conditions following not only digitisation, but also globalisation and liberalisation, have made it increasingly difficult to run a profitable business within the industry in the Nordic countries (Rønning et al., 2012: 73ff).

In addition, the Danish book industry’s recent liberalisation has contributed to a completely different structure in the commercial distribution system than what is found in the UK and USA with a long tradition of liberal book markets (i.e. without a netbook agreement). Both digitisation and liberalisation of the book market have hit the traditional retailers hard. Internet bookstores experience an increasing share even of print book sales and specialised suppliers have taken over sales to libraries. The number of bookstores, especially in shopping streets, has been falling steadily and hereby publishers have lost a significant window for their publications. Power has shifted from the traditional players within the industry to supermarkets that sell huge stocks of print bestsellers. Generally speaking, turnover measured both in volume and in revenue is decreasing while the focus on individual authors and titles is increasing (Forlæggerforeningen, 2012: 7).

Denmark has not experienced the heavy concentration of bookstore chains that has characterised the UK and USA and does not have the same vertical concentration between publishers and bookstores that characterises the book industries in Norway and Sweden (Rønning and Slaatta, 2012). Likewise, there have not been sufficiently strong private players to build a market for Danish e-books as Amazon (and Apple) has done within the UK and USA markets (Thompson, 2012: 374ff). At present Saxo.com is dominant among Danish Internet bookstores. The Swedish Adlibris recently sold its Danish division to Saxo.com after five years on the Danish market, and Denmark’s largest publishing house, Gyldendal, has closed its Internet bookstore, g.dk.

An increasing part of the digital literature is also being self-published, since the production no longer offers great technical or financial problems. Saxo Publish among others offers technique and marketing by Saxo.com at a charge of 30% of the title’s retail price. The model is similar to that found at Amazon and Apple, as well as a variety of other platforms (OECD, 2012: 32). Since 2011, the open network NewPub has existed in Denmark as a platform for mutual help and inspiration for self-publishers. The network also operates two Facebook pages, including NewPub – New books where members can find information about new releases. Recently, NewPub has had a major break-through in that it has formed an agreement with one of the largest book chains to display all books by micro- and self-publishers; e-books are displayed via so-called ‘book cards’.

Copyright

The major challenge in the relationship between public and private players in the book world has always emerged from copyright. The first actual legislation within the field was Lov om Eftertryk m.m. af 29de December 1857 (Act Concerning Piracy etc.), which was passed in the same year as the first Danish trade act. Although the primary intention was to regulate conditions among publishers (and printers), Danish authors gained some recognition of their right to determine whether, when and how a literary work should be published, and the right to enjoy both the material and immaterial fruits thereof.

The law had very little influence on actual practice, however, and in the 1890s it was a controversial topic in parliament and among authors and publishers. The cause was an extensive use or abuse of both Danish and foreign novels in newspapers. The novels were published as serial stories without compensation and often even without the authors’ knowledge. Authors therefore insisted that Denmark should join the Berne Convention for the International Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, but Danish legislation was not comprehensive enough to do so. The struggle to implement a modern copyright act concurrently laid the foundation stone of the Danish Authors’ Society, founded in 1894. The result was a pared-down but adequate Danish law in 1902 and accession to the Berne Convention in 1903 (Worsøe-Schmidt, 1994).

Only with adjustments in 1912 did Denmark equal other European countries in terms of protecting authors’ and publishers’ rights. From both authors’ and publishers’ points of view it then started to go the wrong way, however, with every new revision limiting rights of the copyright holders until the mid-1990s. By then photocopying presented a far greater threat to copyright than the unauthorised use of literary works in other media had ever been, as notably public and semi-public institutions exerted pressure on these rights. Since 1961, the Copyright Act thus has contained a right of retransmission (including library lending) of published works without consent from the copyright holders, and it has legalised making single copies of printed material for private use. The 1961 Act did not authorise photocopying on a large scale, as happened in the following decade in the case of copying educational materials. This problem, that public institutions habitually were committing illegal acts, was solved in 1985 not by reinforcing the basic principle of copyright, but by legalising the practice through agreements and new legislative changes that included compulsory license. Educational institutions, for instance, have since been obliged to remunerate authors even though they do not need to obtain their permission when copying their works.

The dilemma of cultural politics

The core of the problem is that the modern state according to the prevailing liberal mind-set is required to ensure both the creators’ (copyright-holders’) and the public’s - i.e. the audience’s – interests. The resulting dilemma may not be immediately eradicated. Culture in the narrower sense, literature, art, theatre etc., is hovering between private enterprise and the public good. On the one hand, production, distribution and consumption of cultural products (e.g. books) is considered a purely private matter – i.e. it is up to private enterprise to write, publish, sell and buy or read literature. On the other hand, the substance of culture is perceived as a common concern – not just a trivial benefit for the population, but also a fundamental necessity for democracy.

The story of the Danish Copyright Act reflects both the dilemma and the distribution of power between the state (including public institutions) and the market players. Authors’ and publishers’ copyright to print material has been gradually reduced in terms of both public lending right and copying. The recent Copyright Act of 2008 expresses the rights in only 10 paragraphs, while limitations fill 42 paragraphs.

Unlike print material, film, musical works and works in digital form have been subject to increasing protection. Officially, the argument above all is that modern technology allows you to make copies of movies, music and digital works not only of the same content, but also of the same kind and quality as the original, which is not economically advantageous for printed works. The increasing tightening of copyright in relation to other types of work should also be viewed in conjunction with producers’ strength. While relatively small publishing houses produce the majority of printed works, powerful international media groups produce the bulk of film, music and digital works.

According to current law, works in digital form that are stored on ‘portable’ media, such as CD-ROM, and available to the public, e.g. in a library, may be copied without permission whereas digital works on ‘non-portable’ media, e.g. the Internet, may not be copied – even for private use – unless they are published in connection with printed literary work. Digital works, such as e-books that are not stored on ‘portable’ media, are copyrighted to the same degree as pictures, movies and music. Each download is considered ‘reproduction’ or copying in the copyright sense, and therefore digital works may not be retransmitted without consent from their authors. With the digitisation of literature, the protection of authors, publishers and other creators attached to this type of cultural expression has finally reached the same level of protection as that of picture, sound, film and music. Thus, e-lending is quite different from print-book lending (cf. Matulionyte, 2015)

Then head of Copenhagen Central Library at the time, Jacob Heide Petersen (2011), remarked: ‘This situation has prompted some members of the library community to advocate for changes in the copyright legislation that would give libraries the same special copyright exemptions for loans of e-books as they have for physical books’.

E-books and public libraries

Public libraries have an obligation to promote enlightenment, education and cultural activity by selecting material based on criteria, quality, comprehensiveness and topicality and making it freely available to the public. Alongside the classic (print) media other suitable media ‘such as electronic information resources’ (the Public Libraries Act § 1) are mentioned. Thus, for some politicians and library officials it is obvious that libraries should also make digital literature and e-books available. While locative narrative, like hypertext, still is for the few and daring, e-books at present just remediate print books, not altering the reading experience in any radical way (Greenspan, 2011).

The problem, however, is that normally one does not buy a copy of an e-book, but a licence to download or stream the title on a number of registered ‘readers’ such as dedicated e-reader, iPad, PC and smartphone. This considerably limits the consumer’s rights, one of them being that you cannot lend your e-book to a friend without lending her your device as well (cf. Claesson, 2009: 199; Matulionyte, 2015: 3). Libraries cannot buy e-books designed for lending to the public; they have to buy licences.

Not everyone agrees that it is an obvious task for public libraries to venture into the e-book market. As publishers demanded – and still demand – payment for each individual download, the lending of e-books might have relatively heavy consequences for the library economy if e-books get too popular among borrowers. Joacim Hansson, professor at the Document Academy and the Department of Library and Information Science, Linnaeus University, Sweden, has stated: ‘Access to e-books isn’t a question of democracy. Reading is. Free loans in public libraries are. E-books aren’t’ (Hansson, 2011). He has pointed out that as long as the public shows no great interest in e-books there is an actual risk that libraries might support a format or media, which in a few years is substituted by a more manageable one.

According to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), four licence models dominate international library access to e-books: (1) Multiple User Access/Limited Time, (2) Single User Access/Perpetual Time, (3) Single User Access/Limited Term and (4) Single User Access/Limited Circulation. In the USA, libraries often combine these models as different publishers use different models while smaller European public library systems often choose one of the models (IFLA eLending Group, 2014).

In his report, A Review of Public Library E-Lending Models, Dan Mount (2014) has analysed public library e-lending models in 14 European countries, Canada and two US states. He has found 18 different models based on four different business models and his main conclusion is:

… it is clear that the policy environment in which individual e-lending models operate has a significant impact on their scope for development and success. Indeed, in many of the European models examined in this study, the development and creation of national e-lending programmes and regional e-lending pilots have been supported by dedicated policies, strategies and funding to promote e-lending. (Mount 2014: 91)

eReolen.dk

To manage the task of lending e-books the Danish library system in 2011 established eReolen.dk³ as a consortium of four county libraries and the libraries in the three main cities of Denmark – Aarhus, Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. The consortium is made up of a steering committee, consisting of representatives from the libraries in the consortium, and four project groups for editing the site, making choice of materials, handling technology and support. The project groups consist of employees from the participating libraries. The consortium entered into an agreement with Publizon, owned by the two largest Danish publishing houses, Lindhardt & Ringhof and Gyldendal, with whom the library system already co-operates on Netlydbog.dk (a common library site for lending audio books). At this time, Publizon formed the only platform for distribution of e-books.

The agreement was based on transaction-based payment for downloads, number one of the above mentioned models, in this version called ‘click price’ that is the same for all titles, but varies according to the age of the publication, from kr.10.50 for titles more than a year old to kr.14.50 for new titles less than six months old. The division of the payment between publisher and author solely depends on the negotiations between the two parties. In general, the participating publishers made their entire list available but for the first six months, they could withhold a title or cap the number of loans. The affiliated libraries could regulate their expenditure by setting a maximum number of downloads for each user or by capping the total monthly expenditure in the district which meant that eReolen would be closed for users in that particular district when the cap was met.

Right from the start the construction was criticised for ‘power play’ because only the two owners of Publizon participated in the negotiations and because micro- and self-publishers were excluded from eReolen as Publizon at the time cooperated only with registered companies (see Ebbesen 2011; Krabat 2011; Publizon 2011). In addition, the fixed click charge irrespective of the books’ retail price was criticised by a cultural analyst stating that in theory e-books could be sold at a lower price on the market than libraries would be charged for download through eReolen (Søndag Aften, 2011).

The role of the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media

The enterprise of establishing eReolen has been fully in line both with the digitisation strategy of the Ministry of Culture and the library system’s focus on strategic partnerships, the ultimate dream being ‘Click here – and you are right there in the seamless library of the knowledge society’ (Thorhauge, 2010a). An examination of available documents in the Danish Agency of Culture’s online archive shows that the project apparently started at the initiative of the director general of the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media at the time, Jens Thorhauge. In 2010, the agency made a massive effort to get the discussion about e-books started at the local libraries as the item was on the agenda for that year’s annual Head of Library meeting. A discussion paper (Styrelsen for Bibliotek og medier 2010 – my translation) was made for a preparatory thematic meeting in the agency, which concluded:

… new media tend to complement rather than replace old media. This means that both libraries and publishers for many years to come will have to offer both print and digital books as two parallel formats and modes of distribution. It will hardly be possible to realise all the savings by digitisation and it would be necessary to invest in digital solutions. In this situation, it is not an easy task to strengthen the dissemination of Danish e-books. On this basis, it will be useful to establish a cooperation to test business models, technical solutions and strategies for channelling.

At the meeting Thorhauge (2010b – my translation) presented a paper on ‘New partnerships on e-books?’ in which he emphasised that ‘the e-book is the ultimate library dream – access anywhere for everybody’ and added that ‘as a business concept it is brilliant owing to its cost-reducing method (print, transport, storage)’. Publizon’s director Steffen Sørensen (2010 – my translation), on the other hand, started his presentation by voicing the industry’s concerns and among other things stated that ‘the publishers’ future revenue sources are uncertain’ and that the ‘cannibalism factor’ by lending of digital materials is unknown. Jacob Heide Petersen (2011) later summed up this question by stating:

The publishers might therefore prefer to have no or very restricted e-book loans. There is, however, in most countries a political demand, that it should be possible for libraries to lend out e-books. The challenge is therefore to find business models that enable libraries to lend out e-books while not undermining the commercial to private individuals.

E-books at the point of take off

There can be no doubt, that eReolen was a resounding success among Danish library users. The number of text downloads from libraries increased by more than a factor of four from 2011 to 2012 and eReolen accounted for 81% of the increase (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Text downloads of public libraries’ digital monographs 2009–2013 and loans from eReolen 2012–2013.

	2010	2011	2012	2013
All Denmark	186,968	292,692	1,264,141	1,442,258
Hereof eReolen^a			789,368	641,698

Source: Statistikbanken, BIB4 (2014). Public libraries stock and use of electronic resources by material type, electronic, inventory, region, location and time. ^aNetbib.dk 2013.

From the publishers’ point of view, 2012 actually formed the kick-off year of the e-book market (see Table 2). From 2011 to 2012, the total turnover from digital publications (audio books and e-books) rose 31.2% while volume sales doubled. Direct sales in particular contributed to the rise with 68 % in turnovers and more than a factor of three in volume sales (see Table 2). Still, digital publications accounted for only 4.9% of the total turnover and 8.4% of volume sales in 2012.

Table 2.

Publishers’ sales of digital publications.^a

Sales channel/year	2010		2011		2012		2013
	M DKR	1000 vol	M DKR	1000 vol	M DKR	1000 vol	M DKR	1000 vol
Bookstore	16.4	155.9	13.7	137.0	14.8	273.5	24.0	99.6
Rest of the world^b	0.2	2.6	0.2	1.8	0.7	5.9	0.1	–
Supermarket etc.	11.5	399.7	8.0	458.5	13.7	541.5	1.3	16.6
Direct sales^c	22.8	205.2	35.0	342.7	58.8	1089.8	163.0	–
Total	40.1	763.3	56.8	937.9	88.0	1910.7	188.4	–

Source: Bogbarometret (2010, 2011) and Forlæggerforeningen Årsstatistik/Danish Publishers’ Association Annual Statistics (2012, 2013).

Note: The statistics cover an estimated 85 % of total production. Bases of the figures are revised regularly, so that comparisons over several years should be read with caution. Moreover, the calculation method changed from 2013, when the total number of digital copies was omitted because ‘a substantial portion of sales are made as license based sale’. ^aIncluding both audio and text books. ^bSales to bookstores, institutions, organisations, etc. outside of Denmark. ^cIncluding sales to public institutions, e.g. eReolen.

Many publishers as well as scholars have wondered why e-books have taken so long to take off. Don-Hee Shin (2011: 274) has stated that user acceptance is probably the most important challenge e-books are facing. Stig Hjarvard and Rasmus Helles (2013: 37) have noted that e-book readers have reached ‘critical mass’ in Denmark and tried to explain this fact by using Rogers’ diffusion theory. They believe that e-books offer ‘pleasurable reading experiences’ and that ‘the technology is perceived consistent with the individual’s existing values and needs’. However, it seems that the main reason for the e-book take-off in Denmark simply is the fact that by means of eReolen a satisfactory number of Danish e-books became easily and not least freely available to Danish readers. The general audience requires free or at least very low cost online material and people expect a significant price gap between print books and e-books (Benhamou, 2015: 123), which was not found on the Danish book market before eReolen.

The e-book war

The agreement between Publizon and eReolen had a built-in renegotiation of terms after the first year. These negotiations, however, collapsed very quickly. The consortium behind eReolen apparently had no interest in testing other business models while the owners of Publizon, Gyldendal and Lindhardt & Ringhof were equally uncompromising in their demands for a licence-based model.

Elisabeth Fogtdal Nøjgaard, CEO of Gyldendal and one of the publishers’ two negotiators, among other things, stated that click price:

has proven to cannibalize the market (…) Libraries play an important role as cultural facilitators (…) But a balance must be found, as it has been established with analogue books. (…) In order [for the publishers] to support making new titles available, users must experience some kind of friction when using eReolen. Otherwise it will be difficult to convince them that the e-book has an economic value’. (Bay Nielsen, 2012 – my translation)

The major publishers simply threatened to cease cooperation if they did not get concessions.

Fundamentally, the library side assumed that since the successful kick-off of the e-book market was mainly due to eReolen, both publishers and authors would benefit from the collaboration. Bo Fristed, then-project manager at eReolen, dismissed the publishers’ threat and argued that books for eReolen might found elsewhere:

We know how far we will go, and we have alternatives to the traditional contracts. No matter what, there will be content on eReolen 1 November 2012, when the pilot project ends. The project was a partnership and publishers that wanted to be part of the model participated, but we can easily imagine inviting more partners into eReolen and having a broad portfolio of publishers who are part of different business models. Among other things, the libraries have a desire for more versatility in eReolen, for example in form of English-language literature. (Mønsted, 2012 – my translation)

This somewhat uncompromising attitude corresponds poorly with the official position of the library system. The director general of the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media, Jens Thorhauge, had recently stated: ‘By partnerships we understand mutually binding agreements on collaboration which will benefit all parties’ (Thorhauge, 2010a). On the other hand, Danish publishers seem to have a poor memory of what happened on the US book market when first Amazon and later Apple decided to pep up the e-book marked by setting retail prices at $9.99 which actually made the US publishers shake in their shoes (Thompson, 2012: 374ff). Apart from this, a general problem concerning public-private partnerships seems to be evaluation deficit, among other things, due to lack of independent evaluators and a poor definition of the ‘counterfactual’ against which the public-private partnerships are judged (Hodge and Greve, 2007: 549ff).

Negotiations ended in an open break between the parties when the two major publishers, Gyldendal and Lindhardt & Ringhof, withdrew from eReolen and started a competing site, eBib.dk, instead. Some of the medium-sized publishers, Politikens Forlag, Modtryk, DJØF and Gad, who had either never been part of eReolen or had chosen to discontinue the cooperation, instead joined eBib. Publizon is also responsible for this platform, which offered e-books to libraries by a so-called licence model, number three of the above-mentioned models. Libraries had to purchase the number of copies of titles they wanted to be able to lend simultaneously and each copy could be lent only four times. EBib stated that on average prices per loan would be the same as on eReolen.

The conflict was not due only to particular persons holding the important positions, e.g. the publishers’ negotiators or the project manager at eReolen, but it seems to be rooted more deeply within the opposing views on the book market and the self-images of both the publishing industry and the library system. It continued about a year after the replacement of the eReolens project manager and was resolved only after severe political pressure. The public library system gave in to the major publishers’ demands and by 1 January 2015, eBib was merged with eReolen. The same licensing model that had been working on eBib was then applied to the major publishers’ titles. A year later, however, Gyldendal along with two medium-sized publishing houses, Modtryk and Politikens Forlag, again left eReolen because they found that even this model was cannibalising the private sales of e-books.

A more commercial result of the emergence of an e-book market is the private enterprise, Mofibo, which relates to e-books in many ways equal to how Spotify does to music and Netflix to film, namely a digital streaming service on a subscription basis. An entrepreneur, Morten Strunge, founded it in the summer of 2013. He had no background in the book business but had previously set up a Danish telecommunications company, Onfone, which he sold to TDC in 2011. Mofibo is currently present in Denmark and Sweden and boasts of being the largest Danish distributor of e-books with over one million pages read daily (Mofibo, 2014). Here is a brand new player on the book market taking on a brand new function made possible by digitisation – although one might compare the new business with the 19^th-century circulating or rental library.

Digital interim

In an age of digitisation, old gaps between private and public players on the cultural scene once again become visible and thus display the inadequacy of traditions and legislation based on these traditions. The gaps become visible when the field is analysed in relation to functions rather than institutions. An interim is afoot until new relations between new functions have been established and new rules negotiated.

Clearly, the call for library lending of e-books came from a political rather than public demand and apparently, it came from within the library system rather than parliament or local authorities. The creation of and fight over eReolen shows that the Danish library system is in no way – not even within its classic book field – just a passive, public distribution and cultural facilitating organisation, whose function in the name of cultural democracy is to promote a reading culture and mitigate some of the adverse market effects. If anything, the late modern library system in a small language area like the Danish is a very pro-active public institution that represents a significant power factor taking on new functions in relation to the creation of new business models on the digitised book market.

The core of the problem is that the public library system has transgressed its traditional function as ‘cornerstone’ of cultural politics and started acting as an independent player in the book market. That is no wonder. As the Danish book industry has struggled over the last 10–15 years to adapt to a liberalised market peaked with a financial crisis, it simply has had neither volume nor energy to build a Danish market for e-books.

Volume and energy, on the other hand, were at hand for a dynamic director general of the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media when he initiated the creation of eReolen as a private-public partnership – even though in the process he might have displayed a small hole in the centre of his understanding of the digitalised book market.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Lisbeth Worsøe-Schmidt, PhD, is a lecturer at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has studied book history for the past 20 years, including social history of Danish authors and the emergence of a literary public sphere in the 18th century, the forming of the Danish Authors’ Society in 1894, cultural policy, and different aspects of the relationship between public libraries and the book market in Denmark.

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