I have been visiting UIUC, talking with folks at the UI Libraries, the Information School (GSLIS), and NCSA. It's an incredibly impressive place, and I left jazzed and excited by all the good work.

In my conversations with Library staff, we wound up riffing on ebooks and libraries -- mainly discussing the current distribution models to libraries, the limitations placed on users by DRM, and the liabilities placed on the development of essential library services, such as electronic reserves. The AUL for Services, Scott Walker, spoke a speculation that he and a colleague, Mary Laskowski, have been considering; it troubled me in part I didn't have a ready response, and nor do I now.

His muse, which I reproduce in its whole below, concerned whether or not a trend by publishers and ebook vendors to commoditize at an increasingly granular level -- e.g. from the book, towards the chapter, and perhaps even below that -- has any implications for the ability of libraries to continue providing Fair Use based privileges to their patrons.

In a nutshell, the question I posed was what impact there would be on e-reserve practice now that publishers and vendors (e.g., Amazon) have begun to market the book chapter, rather than the entire book, as a commercial item. If one of the arguments underpinning Fair Use is that providing electronic access to a small percentage of the content of an entire book does not represent competition with the market potential for the entire book, what would we do if the publisher stance is now that one cannot "compete" with the chapter (will Fair Use cover no more than the digitization of 10% of the content of a marketable chapter of a book)?

Whatever the amount reflected (as Fair Use is not determined by any explicit or specified amount of excerpting) the question is relevant. Several of us would be interested in discussion of the possible impact on Fair Use applications for e-reserves or other library applications necessitated by this transformation of the commercial ebook product. 

My colleague John Unsworth (Dean, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, UIUC) noted that what bears most consideration is what aspect of the work is actually copyrighted, not what is vended.  If the book is copyrighted, then fair use should be able to be interpreted over that corpus, regardless of how its component aspects are sold or licensed.   It will be vitally important to retain this perspective as we enter a commoditized world where more and more access to literature is restricted through licensing agreements, particularly where such licenses might cover content that is actually in the public domain.