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Vol. 45 No. 4 — May 2025

FEATURE

Librarians have not been taking this lying down. In Maryland, librarians sponsored legislation that would have required any publishers offering ebooks to the general public to offer libraries access to those ebooks “on reasonable terms.” The publishers sued, and a federal court ruled that the proposed legislation violated federal copyright law. New York governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a similar measure. Librarians have now regrouped and introduced legislation in six other states, based on the laws regulating contracts—which they hope will avoid the copyright issue. The Association of American Publishers begs to differ. The American Booksellers Association, the Authors Guild, the Independent Book Publishers Association, the Copyright Alliance, and others formed a coalition to vigorously lobby against the adoption of any such legislation.

The issue is far from resolved. We are still in the heat of the battle, which makes this a great time to sit down and take a look at the actual facts.

There is no doubt that ebook prices for public libraries are high—at least for the Big Five publishers that account for the vast majority of books sold to public libraries. In the June 2024 article “The State of Digital Content in Public Libraries” (infotoday.com/cilmag/jun24/Blackwell-Parker--2024-The-State-of-Digital-Content-in-Public-Libraries.shtml), Michael Blackwell and Cami Parker tracked ebook and e-audiobook prices for public libraries and compared those to what the publishers charge the general public for the same titles. They found that the average price of an ebook in December 2023 was $54.62, which was almost 4 times the Kindle price and more than 3 times the consumer price for print. For e-audiobooks (the fastest-growing segment of the digital market), the prices were even worse—an average of $73.49 for libraries, which was 3.85 times more than a consumer would have paid via Audible. Not only that, but between May 2023 and December 2023, library prices for ebooks had increased 4.4% for ebooks and 3.7% for e-audiobooks, while the consumer prices for ebooks had increased by only 1.8%. In this same period, consumer e-audiobook prices had actually declined by 22.5%.

Based on the fact that library ebook and e-audiobook prices are at least 3 to 4 times what consumers are paying for the same content, we might expect it would cost the library 3 to 4 times what it cost to circulate a book from its print collection—especially since libraries generally get a substantial discount off the consumer price for print editions. But the data shows otherwise.

EBOOK CONSORTIA

Every year, IMLS publishes the Public Libraries Survey, which includes detailed data on staff, spending, collections, and services for virtually every public library in the U.S. The most current data is from 2022. It tracks very specific data on the amount of each library’s collection budget for electronic content (ebooks, e-audiobooks, and any other econtent that circulates). It tracks print and electronic circulation separately, as well as the size of each library’s print and electronic collections. I used this data to compare how much it actually costs a library to circulate a print book versus an electronic book by dividing the library’s budget for each category by the number of circulations to get a cost-per-circ figure for both print and electronic collections.

The “2022 Public Libraries Survey” includes data on 9,248 public libraries in all 50 states. For purposes of this analysis, I selected libraries that were clearly offering electronic collections and spending money for them. To be included, a library had to have an electronic collection, a budget for electronic materials, and circulation of electronic materials that, combined, totaled greater than zero. That left me with 7,358 libraries that offered their patrons electron ic collections and paid money to do so. I then took a look at all of these libraries as a whole and by population served to see if there were differences between them.

Median cost per circulation for print books for all libraries was $0.69; for electronic, it was $0.93. This shows that, on average, it costs a library about $0.24 (or about 35%) more to circulate an electronic item compared to an item from its print collection. For the 85% of libraries that serve populations of 50,000 or less, the difference is even smaller—only $0.12. Thus, while electronic content is slightly more expensive overall, it is clearly not 3 to 4 times more expensive.

Why? Because most public libraries in the U.S. don’t actually have to pay for most of the ebooks their patrons borrow. Most belong to digital library consortia, where a group of libraries gets together, and each agrees to pay for some content held by the consortium. In exchange, their patrons get access to the consortium’s entire catalog. The Washington Anytime Library provides a good example of how these consortia work. It serves 45 libraries in the state of Washington, most having service populations of less than 100,000 patrons. Each member library, based on the size of its service population, is obligated to contribute a certain amount to purchase content. In return, their patrons then have access to all titles held by the consortium.

For example, Port Townsend Library, which serves a population of 10,290, is a member of the consortium. In 2024, it paid a $9,131.87 fee to be a member. In exchange, its patrons had access to the consortium’s catalog of 144,000-plus items—which is more than 3 times larger than Port Townsend’s entire print collection of 44,000 items. In fact, if Port Townsend’s electronic collection consisted of physical items, it is doubtful that the print collections could even fit into its building, which is just about 10,000 square feet.

In 2023, Port Townsend’s patrons borrowed 16,793 items from the consortium, giving it an electronic cost per circ of $0.54 compared with a print cost per circ of $0.36. The electronic cost is a little higher, but not 3 or 4 times as high, and for its investment of $9,132 per year, there is no way that the Port Townsend library on its own could have ever purchased an electronic collection the size of the Washington Anytime Library. Assuming a combined average price of $60 per item for both print and audio content, Port Townsend could have afforded to purchase just 152 items in 2024. This is not even close to the 144,000 items its patrons can borrow from the consortium catalog.

The only U.S. libraries that have electronic cost per circ approaching 2 to 3 times their cost per print circulation are those 15% serving populations of 50,000 or more. While many of these libraries also belong to consortia, they generally have to license a much higher percentage of their own content. They don’t benefit as much from the cost break the smaller libraries get.

The effect of these consortia arrangements shows up when you track the size of library collections within the past decade. Because of consortia, the size of the median library electronic collection is now more than 75,000 items. This is more than twice the size of the median library print collection of 30,000 items, which has been declining even as electronic collections have been increasing.

For the vast majority of U.S. libraries that serve smaller populations (84.5%), the ebook consortia model has been quite a bargain. It has allowed them to offer their communities electronic collections that average twice the size of what they have on their shelves and at a cost per circ that is only marginally higher than their print collections.

STAFF COSTS

But there is one other even more significant cost difference between ebooks and print books in libraries: staff. The average cost of $0.93 per circ that libraries spend on ebooks pretty closely reflects the library’s total cost of circulating those books. A small amount of staff time may have been spent to select a title and to decide whether to repurchase it when its license expires. However, these are minor costs and also apply to the print collection. But ebooks and e-audiobooks have none of the other staff handling costs associated with the print collection. Most libraries don’t catalog ebooks—the vendor does that. Ebooks don’t require physical processing—no spine labels, mylar covers, barcodes, security strips, RFID tags, or other items that are necessary to prepare a physical book for circulation.

Even more importantly, most patrons check out ebooks on their own from the vendor’s app or website. Ebooks don’t require a circulation desk or the people to staff it. When their loan period is up, ebooks are returned automatically. No need for the staff to check them in, reshelve them, send out notices to try to get them back, or charge and collect fines for those not returned on time (or at all). Finally, when ebooks reach the end of their license, they are automatically removed from the collection—no need to assign staff to inventory and weed them as libraries must with their print collections.

All those functions require staff—and a lot of them—to manage the library’s physical collection. On average, libraries spend 66% of their total operating budgets on staff (while spending only about 10% of their budgets on collections, both electronic and print). A good number of these staff members are involved in the various tasks required to manage the library’s physical collection, almost all of the functions that are handled automatically and without additional cost with ebooks.

Let’s take the whole picture into account. Most libraries in ebook consortia don’t actually have to pay for most of the books they circulate. Additionally, an ebook collection requires only a tiny fraction of the staff needed to maintain and circulate the physical library collection. So, far from being overpriced, ebooks could actually turn out to be quite a bargain for libraries—if libraries want to take advantage of it.

EBOOKS AND LIBRARY USE

Ebooks may not be costing libraries nearly as much as some have claimed, but IMLS data indicates that libraries have paid a very high price for them all the same. But that price is not measured in dollars; it is measured in the massive decline in physical library use that has taken place since libraries started adding ebooks to their collections. Public libraries first began offering ebooks in earnest around 2012. At that time, libraries were spending 16.7% of their materials budget on ebooks, but the vast majority of it was still going to print. In the past 10 years, total book budgets have remained static when inflation is taken into account, but the way those budgets are allocated has changed radically. In 2022, libraries were allocating 40% of their budgets to ebooks and only 47% to print.

This might not be such a problem if library material budgets were healthy to begin with, but they are not. Libraries are currently spending only 10.7% of their budgets on materials of any kind, less than at any time in recent history. That translates to significantly less money being available to add items to the print collection, which means many fewer new titles, fewer copies, and longer holds queues for popular titles.

During this same time period, many libraries began adopting a philosophy that libraries were more than just books. If they were going to survive, they needed to turn themselves into community hubs, makerspaces, program centers, and a variety of other functions that have little to do with collections. In order to accommodate all of these new uses, many libraries began actively reducing the size of their print collections.

The result of cannibalizing the print collection budget to pay for ebooks and culling the print collection to accommodate new library uses is that the average size of print library collections has dropped more than 13%, from almost 96,000 in 2012 to just 83,000 in 2022. That drop has been even greater for the largest libraries with the most extensive collections. The 78 major urban libraries with bud gets surpassing $30 million saw a decrease in average collection size of more than 39% during the same 10-year period. Meanwhile, the size of library ebook collections has mushroomed to the point where the average library ebook collection is now more than twice the size of its physical collection.

As libraries have de-emphasized their physical collections, overall library usage—and the use of the physical library in particular— has dropped off drastically. Overall circulation (including e-circulation) is down more than 24% in the past 10 years, with physical circulation down more than 45%. Most concerning, the number of people actually walking through the doors of U.S. public libraries has dropped more than 55%. The decline is pervasive, affecting all types of public libraries—large, small, urban, suburban, and rural. We did have the COVID pandemic during this period, but the decline started well before that. And while COVID represents the nadir, usage has rebounded only a little since then.

It is not that readers have suddenly lost interest in the printed book: The number of print books sold to the general public actually increased 34% between 2012 and 2022, while ebooks sales were down 11% from 2012 to 2020 (wordsrated.com/book-sales-statistics). This is exactly the opposite of what we’re seeing with library circulation. Readers haven’t fallen out of love with the printed book, but it is clear that many of them have fallen out of love with their library.

These trends suggest that, during the past 10 years, public libraries have become much less focused on their physical collections and much more focused on ebooks, programs, community gathering spaces, and the like. If our patrons were good with these changes, we might expect physical circulation to go down—as it has— because there is less material for them to borrow. But we would expect physical library visits to go up as patrons took advantage of the new programs and services being offered. The fact that library visits have decreased by more than half in the past 10 years suggests that this is not the case, and that the physical collection may have been more important to library patrons than many librarians thought. The problem is not that patrons have been walking away from the library, but that in turning away from the printed book, the library has been walking away from its patrons.

The real cost of ebooks to libraries is not their price: Through the ebook consortia, most libraries aren’t paying much more for them than they are for print. And with significantly lower staff costs, ebooks cost libraries much less to circulate than print. No, the real cost of ebooks in libraries is measured in the items we haven’t been adding to our print collections because we’ve been using the money to buy ebooks and pay staff, as reflected by the huge dropoff in print circulation. Most importantly of all, it is measured in all of the patrons who are no longer coming through our doors because they no longer see the library as the place to get books.

Libraries have a choice. They can either continue on the current path, cannibalizing print collection budgets to buy more ebooks and shrinking physical collections to provide more room for programming and community hubs. If they do that, they can expect both physical circulation and patron visits to continue to decline as the library has less and less to offer readers. At some point in the not-too-distant future, it is not too hard to imagine that people will stop going to the library at all and simply borrow their books from an ebook vendor website.

Or libraries can listen to their patrons and reinvest in physical collections, refill empty shelves, and celebrate the printed book instead of treating it as an afterthought. This does not need to be done at the expense of ebooks, but libraries should only be purchasing them once they are sure they have healthy budgets to maintain and expand their print collections. Collections don’t have to come at the expense of programs, meeting rooms, or vibrant community hubs, but it is important to recognize that it is only a strong print collection that attracts readers to libraries, where they can take advantage of everything else on offer.

Following this approach won’t be as economical as running an ebook library off a vendor website, which is the direction libraries seem to be headed. It will require staff, books, shelves, and buildings to house them all in. However, in the long run, it may be the only solution that can reverse the decline libraries are currently experiencing and guarantee that patrons have the kind of library we have all grown to know and love, both now and in the future.