With publishers and libraries at odds over e-book licensing’s long-term expense, hold times, and ethical concerns, a new platform called Briet is pursuing an open-access approach. Briet invites publishers to sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access. Several independent publishers including PM Press, Punctum, Sideshow, and Silver Sprocket are on board.
An initiative of the Brick House publishing cooperative and the Flaming Hydra collective of journalists and artists, Briet (rhymes with plié) is named after, and an homage to, the late French librarian Suzanne Briet. Notably, the open platform arose not long after judges decided in favor of publishers in a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, determining that the IA’s scanning of copyright-protected print materials and lending of the digital copies constituted copyright infringement and was not fair use as the IA contended.
Flaming Hydra cofounder and journalist Maria Bustillos, a Brick House member who has been instrumental to Briet’s philosophy and construction, said the collective began to build the digital platform about 18 months ago, even as the IA case was still in court. The app is a “response to the crisis in e-book licensing and the increasing encroachment on the rights of librarians” to determine what goes into their collections and afford both print and digital books, Bustillos said. “I’m really concerned for the future of archiving and the preservation of digital ownership rights for libraries.”
In addition to Bustillos, Briet’s designers and developers include founding sponsor Paul Ford, of the enterprise AI platform Aboard; tech lead David Moore, who established the nonprofit daily newsletter Sludge; and software developers Jacob Ford and Matthew McVickar. “We had a fantastic librarian helping out over the summer, Heather Neumann,” Bustillos added, and Flaming Hydra contributor Jennie Rose Halperin of digital-rights organization Library Futures "generously contributed guidance, introductions, [and] education.”
Briet is still getting off the ground, but thousands of e-books are already available, the inventory is growing, and a toolkit is readily accessible for libraries and patrons to explore. Bustillos expects to make the platform available on Thorium Reader, using the latest iteration of Readium software, which powers the web-based e-book windows already familiar from the IA Open Library. In the finished version of Briet, Bustillos said, “we can offer LCP [licensed content protection] encryption to people that need and want it. Mind you, if librarians are interested now, we can put the tech pieces together and it’s ready for prime time, completely. You can come and buy books there.”
Ramsey Kanaan, PM Press’s publisher and a Briet early adopter, supports the open approach. “They’re replicating digitally the model of public libraries,” said Kanaan, who values the “intellectual commons” over “corporations big and small doing their best to monetize everything.” Briet imitates “old-fashioned hard-copy libraries, whether they’re public or private,” he said, and his outlook is that “once a library buys a book, they can do with it as they damn well please.” As for PM titles, “we hope libraries will lend our books out hundreds if not thousands of times, because we want our books to be read,” Kanaan said.
Bustillos notes that in the decision against the IA’s scanning and lending model, which she reported on in the Nation and elsewhere, much depended on print books and e-books being defined as separate media rather than equivalent formats. “When you read the pleading in the Internet Archive suit, they say that e-books are a different product,” she said. “The Netflix-ification of books has been the goal.” Briet pushes back on that, with publisher cooperation.
Expectations built into the industry have slowed the startup, though. “I thought it was going to be easy to approach independent and small publishers and say, ‘Come and sell your e-books through us; they’re going to be ownable,’” she said. Instead, digital rights management “has become this enormous issue. Many small publishers are unable to participate because of their distribution deals,” which constrain access to library e-books. Many publishers opting into Briet already offer DRM-free books.
“It’s a real five-alarm fire for libraries,” Bustillos said, because the revolving door of e-book licensing makes collection development expensive and impermanent. “A lot of writers don’t realize that their digital books cannot be sold” due to DRM agreements, she continued. “If authors who love libraries and who became writers in libraries, like me, come to understand that there are commercial constraints on the availability of their digital books, we should all demand that this be in our contracts,” she said. Briet’s goal, she concluded, is to ensure that its inventory of e-books remains perpetually “ownable and archivable” by libraries.
