Solo una questione di linking? Riconsiderare l’opac arricchito nell’era della link economy. Alcune osservazioni a margine su Amazon.it e l’opac nazionale SBN

The article resumes the debate started in December 2013 on the professional mailing list of Italian librarians, AIB-CUR, about linking titles in the national union catalogue, Opac SBN, to Amazon.it and AbeBooks.it through ISBNs. It aims to analyse the decision made by ICCU in the double context of the evolution of opac and the decline of physical bookshops crushed by Amazon competition. Finally it summarises the License Agreement of Amazon's Product Advertising API giving some details about commissions on book sales earned by Amazon associates. The article's aim is to stress the importance of ethical concerns when the library considers opac enrichment with online book vendor ads and proposes to examine this initiative not only from the functional point of view of the user needs and the library service policy, but also in the light of the present context of book retailing and the disruptive innovation caused by online commerce exploiting the link economy based on web services.