I agree. I also think it’s cheesy to keep hammering OCLC on its financials if you aren’t willing to open your own books. It’s taking advantage of OCLC’s nonprofit status.

Jerry Kline, III owner and SkyRiver puppetmaster, is no knight in shining armor, coming to libraries’ rescue by slaying the behemoth OCLC. He’s a shrewd business man with a chip on his shoulder. He’s mad as hell that OCLC is entering the ILS business. Going after their cataloging service, still the utility’s cash cow, seems fitting revenge. But this may not be all to the good.

I had the chance to see Kline discuss SkyRiver last fall. I wasn’t impressed. He bristled at questions about where the records came from (in some cases, they harvest them via Z39.50 from libraries, sometimes without those libraries’ knowledge or permission). He repeatedly fell back on the argument that OCLC hides behind tax laws to keep its non-profit status and that his actions were all perfectly legal. Both claims may be true. but they strike me as slightly underhanded, and in any case don’t really constitute a basis for moving bibliographic services from the relatively open OCLC world to a closed, for-profit model of the type represented by SkyRiver.

Those familiar with III know that its business model is: charge early and often. Believe me, any enhancements to SkyRiver’s functionality will come at a significant cost. Institutions that believe they can achieve big savings with SkyRiver are going to be disappointed in a few years’ time, when Kline starts upping the ante to build new features. When asked what the pricing model for the service was, he said that he cuts 20% off an institution’s OCLC cataloging charges. In my mind, a pretty poor answer: I may not like my OCLC fees, but they at least have some tie to my shop’s use of their services. With SkyRiver, all bets are off.

I am glad to see someone challenge OCLC’s hegemony. Competition is healthy and we should all benefit from it. I just wish it were someone other than Jerry Kline providing the competition.

showme1946′s comment also implies that others do not have the right to innovate or get into “the market.” I completely don’t get that. III got into the market as an innovator and competitor. Isn’t that the nature of invention?

Tell me, if you had spent your career building such a business only to see it threatened the by the unwelcome intrusion into the market of a behemoth such as OCLC, a behemoth with the overwhelming leverage of Worldcat, what would you do?

The key information in the complaint is the allegation (which I think we all know is a fact) that III has lost ILS contracts because of OCLC’s intrusion into the ILS market. This is a matter of survival, and this is a battle OCLC has been inviting for years.