Overdrive (owned by KKR & Co. Inc., a global private equity firm) has now openly chosen sides in the fight over eBook licensing reform; and it isn’t the side of the libraries that built its business.
In recent public testimony, the company aligned itself with publishers and leaned hard on exaggerated warnings and shaky copyright claims, offering a fear-driven marketing pitch in place of a serious answer to the actual problem: libraries are being forced into expensive, non-negotiable, expiring digital contracts that undermine collection-building, stewardship, and long-term public access.
OverDrive CEO Steve Potash opened his written recent written testimony on B26-0490, D.C.’s “Library E-book Pricing Fairness Amendment Act of 2025,” by positioning OverDrive as a mission-based company and long-time partner to libraries and schools, emphasizing its history, platform investment, and relationships with DC Public Library and DC Public Schools. He thanks the Committee, praises DCPL leadership, and frames his submission as practical insight based on OverDrive’s work with DCPL and DCPS (rather than legal advocacy.)
As the eBook Study Group, we do not dispute that digital access matters, or that platforms can provide real value for discovery, accessibility, and ease of use. ESG’s testimony, however, expressly recognizes that in the digital age, access to electronic books and audiobooks is no longer optional and that for many residents the public library is the primary gateway to that access. The question before the D.C. Council is not whether digital lending is useful. The question is whether public access to digital knowledge will be governed by the public mission of libraries or by private licensing practices that are designed to maximize private leverage and recurring revenue at the expense of long-term public access.
District of Columbia eBook and Audiobook Performance and Engagement Data
A large portion of OverDrive’s testimony offers multi-year circulation, spending, and engagement data for DCPL’s OverDrive-based digital services, including claims about declining “cost per circ” over time, changes in wait times, and growth in unique users. OverDrive also highlights DCPS’s Sora program, including the growth of digital checkouts and unique student users and the value of features like Public Library CONNECT.
This data is presented as “evidence” that the current ecosystem is working and improving. But those charts and trendlines are not a rebuttal to the bill’s underlying purpose. A system can show high usage and still be structurally unfair, financially wasteful, and incompatible with the library mission. The digital environment can be popular and still operate on license terms that force libraries into repeated re-licensing of the same titles, reduce collection diversity, and erode preservation and long-term stewardship.
In fact, OverDrive’s own appendix of pricing examples underscores the real problem. In Appendix D, OverDrive provides “Pricing Examples of Popular Juvenile and Young Adult Titles Available to DC Public Library,” including metered access terms and high institutional pricing for common titles. These examples reveal the market reality libraries face: many titles are sold under models that expire after time or checkouts, and “simultaneous/concurrent” options can be priced far above ordinary expectations for public access. It is difficult to claim the market is functioning fairly while simultaneously documenting the very licensing structures that require libraries to pay repeatedly to maintain access.
Additional Insights and Questions
A. Ebooks and audiobooks are fundamentally distinct from traditional print books and audio CDs
OverDrive’s central framing is that libraries are “not buying the same product” when they acquire eBooks, and that differences in price, rights, and permissions are justified because the product is fundamentally different from print. OverDrive argues that digital lending provides unique operational efficiencies and patron benefits, and it describes decades of platform development and “permission-based” models that respect copyright and depend on rights-holder consent.
This framing is a textbook pivot away from the actual policy question. The bill does not deny that digital formats differ from print, and it does NOT require that eBooks be treated as identical to print. The bill addresses the reality that libraries are compelled into restrictive, non-negotiable licenses that turn public collection-building into a perpetual rental cycle, often at premium prices and with mission-hostile constraints. Digital convenience should not be used as a justification for contract terms that block preservation, constrain lawful sharing and collection management, and require the same public dollars to be spent repeatedly on the same works rather than building enduring collections.
OverDrive also repeatedly attempts to recharacterize the bill as a “Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)-based” scheme and uses that label to attack the motives and legitimacy of the advocacy effort behind it. But that framing collapses on basic facts.
CDL is a model for lending digitized copies of print materials a library already owns, under strict controls designed to replicate physical lending in a digital environment. eBook licensing is the opposite: libraries generally do not own eBooks and cannot rely on ownership-based lending models at all.
Calling this bill “CDL-based” therefore misdescribes both CDL and the bill’s purpose.
ESG’s testimony is explicit: “This is not a copyright bill,” it does not compel licensing or distribution, and it does not interfere with copyright ownership or exclusive rights. It regulates contract terms after a publisher has voluntarily chosen to license eBooks to the District, and it does so using long-established principles of consumer protection, contract law, and procurement.
B. Books are purchased for many different reasons
OverDrive argues that libraries acquire digital books under many models for many purposes, and it warns that the bill would “handcuff” librarians and ban them from using flexible arrangements such as cost-per-circulation or promotional simultaneous-access programs. OverDrive also leans heavily on a provocative label, calling the legislation a “Book Banning bill,” asserting that it would make “millions” of books illegal to purchase.
This is where the Overdrive testimony most clearly obscures the real issue. The bill is not an effort to ban books; it is an effort to stop contracts from banning the library mission. The restrictive licensing practices described in our testimony are what effectively restrict access: expiring licenses that force re-renting, provisions that undermine long-term stewardship, and pricing structures that penalize libraries for serving the public. OverDrive’s “book banning” rhetoric flips the reality by treating limits on abusive contract terms as if they were limits on reading itself. The bill is designed to preserve the ability of the public library to serve residents in a digital environment without becoming a captive renter of its own collection.
Opinion: The Proposed Law Will Not Produce the Outcomes Proponents Seek on Behalf of DCPL
OverDrive’s testimony claims the bill is based on “faulty assumptions,” will not achiev its goals, and will produce disastrous consequences. Potash predicts that most bestsellers will not be available, that large portions of current holdings will become “zombie” titles, and that patrons will stop using the library and may never return. He also asserts that the bill will invite litigation, chill innovation, and harm educational offerings that might fall under broad definitions of “electronic books.”
The point of this kind of prediction is not simply to forecast; it is to pressure lawmakers into accepting a baseline assumption that the current terms are non-negotiable and that any attempt to improve them must be met with withdrawal of access. That is precisely the market power problem these bills are confronting. Libraries cannot negotiate on equal footing when the dominant contract posture is take-it-or-leave-it, when licenses expire by design, and when the library’s public mission can be converted into recurring payments for the same works.
OverDrive also argues that because the bill does not compel publishers to license, it is “doomed.” But OverDrive’s framing misses the legal design on purpose. Our testimony explains that the bill avoids the legal pitfalls that affected Maryland’s earlier approach by regulating contract terms rather than requiring distribution, and by grounding the bill in the District’s authority over consumer protection, contracts, and procurement. The bill also includes a careful trigger mechanism, delaying effectiveness until a multi-state threshold is met so that the District acts as part of a coordinated response rather than in isolation. That structure is not a weakness; it is a deliberate, prudent policy choice.
OverDrive attempts to cast the problem as merely rhetorical, dismissing metaphors like “landlord-tenant” as dramatic. But our testimony uses that framing because it accurately captures the economic and governance reality of expiring, non-negotiable digital licenses: libraries are compelled to rent access repeatedly, with minimal ability to preserve or steward, and with terms that increasingly displace library judgment with vendor-controlled constraints.
Closing
At the end of his testimony, Potash urges the Committee to “kill this bill,” reiterating the claim that it is effectively a “copyright avoidance law” and repeating the “book banning” label. He asserts that OverDrive and its allies are pursuing good-faith negotiations and incremental improvements, and he suggests legislative action is both unnecessary and dangerous.
But the lived reality for libraries across the country is that incremental “improvements” do not solve the underlying structural problem. Libraries still do not own the eBooks they provide; they are compelled to rent them, often under expiring, restrictive licenses that require repeated re-licensing and repeated spending on the same core works. Those practices strain budgets, reduce collection diversity, and undermine long-term equitable access.
The central policy question remains exactly as our testimony states: in the digital age, will public access be governed by the library mission or by private licensing practices that were never designed to serve the public good. OverDrive’s testimony offers platform praise, data dashboards, and fear-based predictions, but it never squarely answers why public libraries should accept a market where taxpayer dollars are repeatedly spent re-acquiring access to the same titles, while preservation and other core functions are contractually constrained.
The ebooks bill in D.C. (and in many other states) is a measured, legally grounded attempt to correct that imbalance. It does not compel distribution. It does not rewrite copyright. It simply ensures that if a publisher chooses to license digital books to a library, the contract cannot contain terms that eviscerate the public mission and convert libraries into permanent renters of their own collections.
Which raises the obvious question: why is OverDrive working this hard to protect the publishers’ leverage, against the very libraries that made OverDrive indispensable in the first place, when the bill is simply asking for fair, durable terms for public access? If your business is truly “mission-based,” this shouldn’t even be controversial. So, OverDrive: why are you siding against libraries on something this reasonable. And why does your testimony read like a publisher talking points deck instead of a partner speaking plainly to the problem? Libraries aren’t asking for special treatment; they’re asking for contracts that don’t punish them for their public facing mission.