The licensed library ebook market is unsustainable.

Currently, most publishers and eBook aggregators force libraries to acquire ebooks with licensing terms that make it impossible for them to meet their standard access and preservation missions. Ebook licenses offered to libraries often:

Are prohibitively expensive – 

  • Ebooks can cost a library three to 10 times the consumer price for the same print book. 
  • All ebook licenses offered to libraries by the “Big Five” publishers expire either after 24 months or 26 checkouts. By contrast, a print book can last significantly longer with standard maintenance and repair. 
  • If the library would like to continue to lend that title, they must repurchase the licenses at the same inflated price. Some libraries pay a cost per circulation fee on top of initial fees.


Data from ReadersFirst.org.

eBook licenses come with restrictions on libraries' lawful, traditional uses – 

  • Cannot be made into accessible formats for print-disabled readers.
  • Ebooks are not allowed to be in the traditional interlibrary loan program. In Connecticut, 82% of available ebooks are under the metered copy model, meaning that they cannot be loaned to other libraries.  
  • A library cannot make preservation copies of ebooks. 
  • Sometimes libraries cannot buy an ebook for several months after it is released, and sometimes ebooks are not available to libraries at any price.  

Libraries have little, if any, bargaining power and are rarely able to change the terms of the contracts offered to them by publishers. As a result, libraries face financial and practical challenges in making ebooks available to their patrons. More and more taxpayer money is spent on repurchasing previously owned materials, which means less and less perpetual access to content and increased hold ratios and longer wait times for library ebooks.

According to Ellen Paul, the Executive Director of the Connecticut State Library Consortium, ebook contracts are like "the Connecticut [Department of Transportation] paying six times more for asphalt than a general contractor and every two years seeing the road disappear."