This week, the news came out that libraries and publishers have agreed to disagree on e-book lending. This will finally clear the way for a fast development of e-book lending in The Netherlands.

Over the last year, library organisations and representatives of the publishing industry have been negotiating a centralised deal for the lending of e-books. It has proven a very difficult process, since both parties could not find common ground on several issues, such as the lending fee, the number of digital copies that libraries could get, windowing, drm, all issues we’ve seen discussed here over the last year.

 The other reason the negotiations went awry was that publishers themselves could not agree on some of the issues. Most importantly, there was a clear division between publishers on the subject of windowing, where some publishers would allow libraries to lend out e-books from the moment the print book came available, while others demanded a window of at least three months and a third group asked for the possibility to determine a “lending window” for each and every book.

This week, both parties announced that all negatiations have been stopped and that libraries are now free to approach publishers individually to make deals on lending. This might be a surprising outcome for some reading this blog, but the situation in The Netherlands is such that on matters such as these, where government has an active role, a centralized deal on a national level is customary.

The good thing is, that now each publisher can determine how much risk it’s willing to take on fees and on windowing, which will undoubtedly be good for the digital market as a whole. In my view, one hurdle on our way to a healthy digital book market has now been removed.