Welcome to the wild frontier of e-books. Whoever gallops in first with stakes and ropes and manages to corral the territory wins. Except the land rush metaphor won't work here; this is more like a rush to try to commandeer the ocean. The damn thing keeps spilling every which way and the waves have a mind of their own.

In spite of all the headaches that e-readers pose, e-books are ubiquitous. I could paste in an e-book right here. If I were a thief, I could forward the chapters someone just emailed me for comment. I remember going to some trouble to get paper galleys of my book to other authors for blurbs a year ago; of course I could have simply pushed a button instead, but then the book would be out there in quicksilver form, slippery as a wave. That hasn't stopped the thieves that offer free downloads. I report them to the lawyers without any hope of restitution; I might as well be shaking an empty cup. Look, if you want to read my book without paying my team directly (the bookseller, my publisher, my agent, and me), you can go to the library. Libraries bought the book in multiple forms. Libraries are my book’s best customer. And HarperCollins, one of the first companies to understand that librarians are customers, to be courted, listened to, valued, and served, has been the perfect publisher for this unabashedly pro-library book.

So when OverDrive, the company that markets e-books to libraries, announced a new policy -- namely, that the library's copy of the e-book would disappear after 26 patrons had checked it out, requiring a new purchase-- the library world roared, and quickly figured out that HarperCollins was the publisher behind the change. My HarperCollins, trying to figure out how to introduce an additional revenue stream for a book that could otherwise be passed along endlessly without wear-and-tear. And of course the librarians went crazy. Think about it: I'm the 27th patron; I see that the book is in the catalog; and then suddenly it's not?

HarperCollins says it is working to protect its authors, but I wasn't consulted and I had to read about this on Library Journal and on the blogs and tweets of my librarian sources. This isn't what I want, e-books with evaporating powers! Are you kidding? No author wants to write a book with the power to disappear. We want the opposite: We want to write books that will last. In my view, this has backfired, just as Amazon's move to delete its Kindle users' copies of 1984 and Animal Farm backfired and reminded us all how creepily vulnerable a Kindle library was to Big Brother. Librarians have quickly united around this issue and begun to feel and exercise their power. Some are talking about boycotting HarperCollins and boycotting all books with digital restrictions and locks, including, yes, a book that makes the case for the importance of librarians in a wild and commercially-biased digital age.

I want HarperCollins to survive, but fairly and smartly-- not on libraries' backs with clumsy attempts to staunch the economic hemorrhaging involved in shifting to a new kind of publishing, and not on authors' backs either. (As Margaret Atwood so charmingly put it, "Who is going to pay for the cheese sandwiches on which authors are known to subsist?") We all need to figure out how to structure this so as many of us as possible can keep supporting the valuable work of writing and reading.

A book is someone's dream and creation. A publisher captures it, enhances it with editing, marketing, a great cover image, and puts it out there. A library buys it and gives it a home. And a patron reads it and uses it to fuel his or her dreams and creations. That patron could be the first reader, or the 27th. Isn’t that the library's business, as the owner of the book?

To send your thoughts to HarperCollins, please address them to library.ebook at harpercollins.com