(Filing on behalf of James English.)

When SimplyE encounters an OPDS entry with a link that has the "open-access" relation it displays a human-readable message like "This open access book is yours to keep." This phrasing originally came from our desire to promote access to public domain titles through the public library, but as our scope has expanded it's become a source of confusion:

• The term "open-access" means one thing in the world of academic publishing, another thing in the world of free culture, and a third thing in terms of the OPDS spec. The "yours to keep" phrasing comes specifically from the "free culture" world and is not generally applicable. The average public library patron lives in none of these worlds, and so telling them this doesn't usually make a difference to their life.
• Even for a public domain book, saying that a book is "yours to keep" over-promises, given that it's currently impossible to get a book out of SimplyE.
• The way the circulation manager design is going, we may not want to serve links with the "open-access" link relation anymore. This is because we want to encourage patrons to "borrow" even free books, so there's a server-side record of the loan and they can access the books and their bookmarks across devices. If we do nothing, we're likely to enter a state where SimplyE effectively never shows this message.

If we want to show a special phrase when indicating that a book is less than completely encumbered by copyright, we need to reevaluate a) how to determine when this is the case, and b) which phrase to use.

My preference would be to remove this phrase altogether; I think our experience over the past few years shows that this generally doesn't affect peoples' behavior. If we're going to customize this stuff I'd rather talk about the terms of the loan – e.g. "you can keep this book for as long as you want".