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Opinion: Publishers have libraries in a bind. We’ve got a novel solution
Remember the old days, when the public library was just a physical place?
Times have changed, and so have our libraries. Today, roughly one-fifth of their offerings don’t come in protective plastic, but rather in electronic form. E-books are one of libraries’ most popular and fastest-growing offerings. And little wonder: you can sit at home on your couch, open an app, and receive your e-book instantaneously. You can carry dozens of them on a single tablet or e-reader.
But there’s a problem: the “Big 5” publishers that own more than 80 percent of the book market are trying to balance their books on our libraries’ backs. When libraries purchase physical books, they can usually lend them for a decade or more. But with e-books, you don’t own the book — you own a contract. And reading the publishers’ fine print for library contracts would make your eyes pop out of your head.
First, there’s the price. For physical books, libraries get a discount, usually paying an average of about $8.50 for mass-market paperbacks. But the opposite is true for e-books. A public library pays $51.99 for a single copy of Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” lendable to one patron at a time. (Compare that with your lifetime-access purchase for $12.99.)
And what does the library get for that extortionate sum? It can loan that single electronic copy 26 times or for two years — whichever comes first. Then the e-book vanishes.
Other e-books are even more expensive. You can buy David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers ” on Amazon for $59.99. The library price for a single copy: $239.99 for two years. For 20? A staggering $2,399.90.
But high prices and limited-time access are just two among the many onerous terms libraries are being forced to accept. E-book licenses also bar libraries from lending e-books through their interlibrary loan systems. They restrict how many copies of an e-book a library can obtain. They prohibit academic libraries from keeping nonpublic preservation copies for their records. And perhaps most perversely, they require libraries to keep the terms of their agreements secret, preventing them from shopping around — or banding together — to negotiate a better deal on behalf of their patrons and the taxpayers.
These restrictions don’t just waste taxpayer dollars: they interfere with libraries’ core mission by preventing them from building catalogs of popular authors, handcuffing their lending activities, and depriving the public of access to books.
Did we mention that they waste taxpayer dollars? Indeed, some communities have already had to raise taxes because of the increased cost of e-books. Imagine if a town repaved a road, and the road disappeared after 26 cars drove over it. If someone asked us to authorize such a wasteful expenditure of public resources, we’d throw the book at them.
So, why are libraries being faced with this dilemma? Two reasons: (1) their public-service mission, and (2) they’ve been forced to keep their negotiations and contractual terms under a cloak of secrecy.
If you or I don’t like the price of the latest James Patterson novel, we just won’t buy it. But libraries feel obligated to obtain popular titles — no matter the terms or price. And because of the secrecy provisions they’re forced to accept, they can’t shop around or negotiate better terms.
Librarians around the state are begging for help. We’ve crafted two bills to give it to them: H.B. 5312 and S.B. 148. These bills bar libraries that receive public funds from agreeing to these onerous terms. By doing so, they help libraries stand together against them, share best practices, and ensure they get the best deal publishers are willing to offer. If a library does sign such a contract, the banned terms are unenforceable.
This solution may seem open-and-shut. But the publishers are trying every trick in the book to stop it.
First, they argue that authors should be fairly paid for their work. We don’t disagree. But this argument is a red herring. While author royalties vary, they are a small percentage of a book’s sale price. Who takes the lion’s share? The publishers. If they really care about paying authors more, they have every right — and ability — to do it themselves. And besides, we doubt authors want to pad their books by gouging libraries.
Second, publishers argue that we can’t take these actions because our bills are preempted by federal copyright law. This claim is simply mistaken: our bills don’t implicate copyright law at all.
Instead, they exercise a core power of state government: regulating how organizations that receive public funds may spend them. They ban libraries from agreeing to these unfair terms that waste taxpayer dollars and interfere with their mission. They impose no obligation on publishers whatsoever.
You don’t need to read between the lines to know how you can help: tell your state legislators to support H.B. 5312 and S.B. 144. (You can sign up to testify or submit written testimony at H.B. 5312’s March 4 public hearing in the Government Administration and Elections Committee.) Then they can be inscribed in our law books and help our libraries provide more titles on fairer terms. That would be a win in everybody’s book.
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