The Surprisingly Big Business of Library Ebooks ⇥ newyorker.com

Danielle Deschamps, in the conclusion to a rather interesting chapter from “Contemporary Issues in Collection Management”, hosted by Open Education Alberta:

Ebook licensing agreements have become the widespread norm for library ebook access. Yet, between libraries and publishers, these agreements, the terms of which are set by publishers, have devolved to an extent that libraries are struggling to maintain their access to ecollections. Publishers perceive libraries as harming their bottom lines and libraries are in a particularly vulnerable place, without much negotiating power. However, there are several optional ways for public libraries to move forward, in effort of balancing their financial capacity while maintaining their ethical principle of respecting intellectual property rights. […]

The subsequent chapter specifically about ebook pricing is also a terrific primer.

Daniel A. Gross, writing in September 2021, in the New Yorker:

To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N.Y.P.L. sent me its January, 2021, figures for “A Promised Land,” the memoir by Barack Obama that had been published a few months earlier by Penguin Random House. At that point, the library system had purchased three hundred and ten perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought six hundred and thirty-nine one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these digital rights cost about as much as three thousand copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about eighteen dollars per copy. As of August, 2021, the library has spent less than ten thousand dollars on two hundred and twenty-six copies of the hardcover edition, which has a list price of forty-five dollars but sells for $23.23 on Amazon. A few thousand people had checked out digital copies in the book’s first three months, and thousands more were on the waiting list. (Several librarians told me that they monitor hold requests, including for books that have not yet been released, to decide how many licenses to acquire.)

If you want to know why publishers so aggressively fought the Internet Archive on its model of lending out scanned copies of physical books, this is the reason. Publishers have created a model which fundamentally upsets a library’s ability to function. There is no scarcity in bytes, so publishers have created a way to charge more for something limitless, weightless, with nearly no storage costs.

What the Internet Archive did was perhaps a legal long-shot, and I worry about the effects of this suit and the one over shellac 78s. But it is hard not to see publishers as the real villains in this mess. They are consolidating power and charging even legitimate libraries unreasonable amounts of money for electronic copies of books which the publishers and their intermediaries ultimately still control.