During the pandemic, many families and schools in the US turned to public library e-books to keep reading. But many titles are not available in libraries, which also do not have sufficient resources to meet the growing demand.
For many families and schools, e-books were essential to keep reading in the middle of confinement. The total number of digital books loaned by the libraries in the United States arrived to 289 million in 2020, a 33% increase from 2019. That places the fierce public library as the main rival to Amazon, which almost completely monopolizes private e-book sales and sells around 487 million year.
But there is a gigantic problem.
Many e-books are extremely limited or unavailable in public libraries, and library budgets are limited to meet the rising costs of e-book demand.
Publishers make the costs of e-books exorbitant for libraries. For example, before covid-19 hit, a typical arrangement in Macmillan was that public libraries had to pay $ 60 for any e-book and could lend it only 52 times or over a period of two years, whichever came first, after which they had to buy the e-book again. Publishers temporarily lowered some prices and relaxed rules on certain titles during the pandemic, but overall costs still severely limit libraries’ ability to offer many books. Some e-book publishing companies, notably Amazon, still refuse to allow libraries access to any of those they publish, while publishers like Macmillan have withheld them from letting them. its news out of the reach of libraries.
The reason publishers may charge a higher price is due to a quirk in copyright law, called the “first-sale doctrine.” Unlike what happens with physical books, American courts have said that libraries have no right to buy an e-book and then loan it out. Instead, publishers only “grant licenses”To electronic books and can deny that license to a library or condition the right to lend the electronic book to the payment of a much higher price.
Some state legislators in the United States are outraged enough to have proposed legislation to oblige publishers to grant licenses of the e-books that are currently withholding from libraries. The state of Maryland It enacted such a law this spring, but publishers are likely to challenge it in court, as federal copyright laws take precedence.
For university libraries and the students who visit them, the restrictions on e-textbooks are even more severe. By one estimate, publishers refuse to grant 85% licenses from electronic versions of textbooks to university libraries, forcing students to buy directly from the publisher or dispense with the books. And according a survey conducted At 82 campuses during the pandemic by US PIRG, a consumer group focused on student concerns, 65% of students have avoided making at least one textbook purchase due to high costs.
When an e-textbook is made available to universities, it often costs more than 10 times the retail price and can come with additional terms and subscriptions that increase costs even more. “You have to pay thousands for a package with some e-books that you really need and a lot of things that you don’t need,” says librarian Joanna Anderson, co-author of a protest letter for these costs signed by 3,000 librarians, academics and students.
The complicated legal distinction between the sale of physical books and the “licensing” of e-books is one of the reasons that private attempts at subscription book services for monthly installments have mostly failed or been widely available. limited number of books. In publishing, publishers have the rights to sell books, but authors often retain the copyrights that would allow licensing of monthly subscription services and have their own demands for fair compensation, so the agreements Subscription services are often legally impossible or financially unsustainable. An example of this it was the closing from Oyster a few years ago. Epic! Books has had a modest success with a subscription service only for a subset of children’s books that are used primarily in schools. Even Scribd, the most successful surviving version, lacks the most popular books.
Amazon has created a solution around this problem by creating an unlimited subscriber reading program, Kindle Unlimited, in which it includes only authors who self-publish with Amazon and opt for the program. It is estimated that almost 50% of e-books Paid downloads now self-publishing, largely due to the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, making their program the most successful model for a monthly unlimited reading service, but only for a limited subset of books.
What is clear is that private deals are unlikely to provide any service that makes a wide range of e-books available to Americans. This, not to mention the problem that private services can exclude families who cannot pay an additional monthly fee.
Therefore, improving library access to e-books should be a priority.
The American Congress could solve the problem immediately if it expanded the scope of the first-sale doctrine to allow school and public libraries to purchase e-books at regular retail prices and keep them in their collections permanently. This would triple or quadruple the amount of e-books libraries could buy under current budgets, and since the books would never expire, they would grow their e-book stores by orders of magnitude over time.
In a review you did in April 2020 on this topic, the US Congressional Research Service noted that Congress considered doing this in 1998, when the copyright law was last updated. However, he postponed that decision until the e-book market “has matured enough and in a way that justifies further action.” Obviously, with almost $ 2 billion in annual sales, e-books have reached that point.
At the same time, the authors, who often deal with financial problems, have reasonable fears of than a reduction in rates that publishers charge libraries would further reduce their income. But instead of relying on the limited budgets of local libraries to provide the revenue authors need to keep writing, Congress could, while restoring the first sale doctrine, institute a “public loan right“federal – PLR, for its acronym in English – a mechanism used by 35 nations around the world, including almost all of Europe, that would offer authors payments for each book, physical or digital, borrowed from a public library.
In fact, the Authors Guild, which promoted a PLR in the US decades ago, relaunched a campaign in 2019 to enact legislation for the National Endowment for Humanities to distribute payments to authors for each book borrowed from a library. “The PLR recognizes two fundamental principles,” he wrote. the then president of the Authors Guild, James Gleick, in 2019: “the need for society to provide free access to books and the right of authors to be remunerated for their work.”
The combination of restoring the first sale doctrine for libraries and instituting a federal PLR system would allow libraries to radically expand the availability of e-books online. And this would address a separate issue that writers and publishers highlight: the rise in online piracy, which the Authors Guild estimates may be eroding book sales by up to 28%. A stronger public library system offering most books online would likely shift much of the pirated downloads to libraries and guarantee compensation for authors.
An additional benefit of a strengthened public library e-book lending system is putting a check on Amazon’s dominance in the private e-book sector, which would limit any price increases or other manipulations of the e-book sector by Amazon. And as a bonus, this new system would make it possible for something like Spotify for books to finally become a reality.
All of this would protect writers’ incomes while restoring libraries to their former role of providing the widest range of books for all communities in the new digital age.
This article is published thanks to a collaboration of Free Letters with Future Tense, a project by Slate, New America, Y Arizona State University.
