What Tangled Webs We Weave

I know that I'm not the only one who's been following Edwin Meller Press lately. I've seen reports and updates on its recent actions in the weekly ALA Direct email newsletters. For those of you who have not been following this series of events as closely, here's a bit of background (with lots of other articles included that you can follow up with and read for yourself).

It all started when a librarian, Dale Askey, criticized Edwin Meller Press for the quality of its publications on a blog post written in 2010. Now, for those of you not in the profession, it is considered part of a librarian's job to examine materials for a library collection and judge whether or not the item is suitable in both content and form. Poorly-bound books would likely be returned to the publisher that sent them because they would not be able to have a long shelf life, requiring the library to repurchase the title if it wanted to keep the title in the collection. Likewise, an item of poor scholarship quality may be returned or passed over because it would not as adequately discuss/explore a topic as other items addressing the same topic would; librarians would try to choose the titles of highest quality to ensure that library funds are spent smartly. And to get this information about items prior to making a purchase, librarians turn to reviews--which are written by publishers, book/item reviewers, and even other librarians. Libraries can't afford to waste money, so librarians will utilize many sources to help them make educated guesses about the value of an item for their collection. So back to Dale Askey. He was providing his own opinion about the materials from Edwin Meller on the blog; the post is no longer on the actual blog, but is available through web archiving (yay for web archiving!). And it seems that Edwin Meller took exception to his criticism. Initially two lawsuits were filed, one against Askey and one against Askey and McMaster University (where he works); since the lawsuits were originally filed, the one against both Askey and McMaster has been dropped, but the one against Askey alone still stands.

And so begins the back-and-forth between Edwin Meller and librarians. Currently, the publisher has stepped up its game and is suing another librarian. Rick Anderson is now the target of a second lawsuit because of his criticisms regarding Edwin Meller and the actions taken against Askey. Anderson's criticisms also took form in a blog; both posts regarding Edwin Meller have been archived (since they were taken down too) and can be seen here and here. The whole situation has gained a lot of attention in the profession and in higher education, and has spawned both petitions to tell Edwin Meller to lay off the lawsuits and a parody Twitter account. I know the saying goes that there is no such thing as bad press, but I can't imagine that Edwin Meller will be able to come out ahead in this.

Since I have no experience with this particular publisher, I have no way to personally attest to the accuracy of Dale Askey's claims. My reason for bringing up this series of events is to illustrate how easily something that we take for granted in a "free" country--being able to criticize a business, a person, a government--can be challenged. Think about all of the websites out there that are solely used to rate or review goods or services: Angie's List, Yelp, even sites that allow customer reviews like Amazon. If we are not allowed to be critical about a product or service, how are we going to be able to tell the wheat from the chaff? And let's be realistic: there is a lot of chaff out there. It's not really that big of a stretch to see that challenging the right of a librarian to criticize the quality of an item is challenging the right to criticize anything. At the core, it's an act of censorship.

I can't divine what Edwin Meller's true motives are and what they hope to gain from these lawsuits, but like some other bloggers I've read I think these lawsuits will cause more damage to the publisher than good.