The goal of these bills is to firmly ground ebook contracts and licenses under state law. The language of the bills does not implicate the purview of the federal government. The bills do not include any language that "forces" publishers to grant a license; the language proposes an approach that does not demand that publishers license to libraries, but instead merely utilizes existing state law to make sure ebook license and contract terms are fairly balanced and are an effective use of taxpayer money.

Previous attempts at state ebooks legislation, such as the eBook legislation at issue in Maryland, contained language requiring that publishers “shall offer” licensed ebooks to Maryland public libraries “on reasonable terms.” The court in Maryland stated that the “shall offer” language in the Maryland ebooks bill was preempted by federal law because “[t]he Act’s mandate that publishers offer to license their electronic literary products to libraries interferes with copyright owners’ exclusive right to distribute by dictating whether, when, and to whom they must distribute their copyrighted works.” In other words, it "forced" publishers to sell to libraries.

By contrast, these eBook bills do not contain the “shall offer” language and instead are rooted in the purview of the state (i.e. contract law), clarifying that states are within their rights to regulate rather than mandate contracts.