Publishers Worry As Ebooks Fly Off Libraries' Virtual Shelves

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: After the pandemic closed many libraries' physical branches this spring, checkouts of ebooks are up 52 percent from the same period last year, according to OverDrive, which partners with 50,000 libraries worldwide. Hoopla, another service that connects libraries to publishers, says 439 library systems in the US and Canada have joined since March, boosting its membership by 20 percent. Some public libraries, new to digital collections, delight in exposing their readers to a new kind of reading. The library in Archer City, Texas, population 9,000, received a grant to join OverDrive this summer. The new ebook collection "has really been wonderful," says library director Gretchen Abernathy-Kuck. "So much of the last few months has been stressful and negative." The ebooks are "something positive. It was something new." But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry's big-five publishers -- Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan -- have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time -- two years, for example -- or number of checkouts -- most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period. The result: Libraries typically pay between $20 and $65 per copy -- an industry average of $40, according to one recent survey -- compared with the $15 an individual might pay to buy the same ebook online. Instead of owning an ebook copy forever, librarians must decide at the end of the licensing term whether to renew. The publishers' licensing terms make it "very difficult for libraries to be able to afford ebooks," says Michelle Jeske, director of the Denver Public Library and president of the Public Library Association. "The pricing models don't work well for libraries." "Librarians argue that digital lending promotes sales in the long run, by introducing readers to authors whose books they might not have bought otherwise," reports Wired. Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, the project leader for the Panorama Project, adds: "I think one of the things we'll see in the postmortem of this year is that the importance of libraries is going to stand out. Any publisher that gets out of 2020 not missing their budgets too much -- they're going to owe that to libraries."

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