Even Libraries Face Mobile Ecosystem Conflict

The 2012 State of America’s Libraries study illustrates the widespread nature of potential disturbances in the mobile, tablet and application ecosystems between ecosystem participants. 


Over 67 percent of U.S. libraries now offer downloadable e-books and 28 percent lend out e-readers “and other mobile devices” to patrons, but “when Random House increased its e-book prices by 100 percent to 200 percent” the “dialogue between the publishing and library communities concerning ebooks…moved to a front burner,” the report says. 


The report also notes that four of the big-six publishers offer no e-books to libraries at all. “No one is quite sure where the ebook–library relationship is going,” the report says.


Penguin, for example ,no longer provide e-books or digital audiobooks to libraries. 


In November 2011 when Penguin stopped offering new e-books to libraries, it also stopped offering e-books to library patrons using Kindles.


A few days later Penguin restored Kindle access, but also noted, “Penguin informed suppliers to libraries that it expected them to abide by existing agreements to offer older digital titles to libraries only if those files were held behind the firewalls of the suppliers.” 

Who would doubt that Penguin business interests with Amazon have much to do with that decision?


Such conflict is par for the course in virtually all business ecosystems affected by mobility. And that increasingly seems to include retail commerce, online commerce, banking, payments, online and mobile advertising, communications, music, video, movies, books and other printed media products. 


Changes in "who" makes money, "how" therefore now affect many products, processes and services that touch any consumer or business in the ordinary conduct of life, in other words.