Just Released: “Ebook Availability, Licensing, and Pricing in Canada and the U.S.: A Follow-Up Study”

From a Computers in Libraries Article by Michael Blackwell, Jennie Rose Halperin, Catherine Mason, and Carmi Parker:

In 2018, Rebecca Giblin and her colleagues created the E-lending Project, measuring in various studies the availability, license terms, and prices of digital titles in Australia. Additionally, using one library vendor, it internationally compared digital findings to print in various ways.  Members of the ReadersFirst Working Group were intrigued. We mounted a follow-up study looking at the three vendors with the most public library market share in Canada and the U.S. to compare them in title availability, licensing type, and cost in order to take a snapshot of the library digital market, especially how it compared to library options in print books. In the last 5 years, many changes have occurred in the library ebook market. This follow-up study measures the effects of those changes and assesses whether library selectors are seeing any improvement in our ability to build collections that are varied, deep enough to support reasonably quick access to popular titles by patrons, and sustainable over time—at least when compared to our print collections.

Libraries have more options for digital licenses than in our previous study. In 2018, ebook licenses ranged from perpetual (that is, accessible forever, or at least as long as the publisher holds the license, though one does well to be suspicious if such licenses truly are lasting) through various forms of metered, with 26 checkouts or 2 years of circulations being the most common. Now, though far fewer ebook titles are available in perpetual access, with all Big Five publishers having gone to metered only, more metered options exist on many titles, from a five-circulation model up to 40 (with 10 allowed simultaneously) or even 100 circulations allowed simultaneously. From one Big Five publisher, Penguin Random House, 1-year or 2-year options for the same title are available for ebooks, with 1-year or perpetual options for audio. We welcome these options, even as we decry the loss of many ebook options for perpetual access. More numerous models complicate ordering—and, for the purposes of our study, factoring effective cost—but they do allow libraries to better allocate limited resources to get the best return.

Our original study looked only at ebooks. For this study, we also looked at audiobooks to account for their growth in use and importance in library collections. In 2024, they made up about 43.1% of digital book circulation, growing 19% that year alone.³ We will make some comparisons of title availability and license type (including cost) among vendors to see if there is any variation, but vendor evaluation is not our aim. Our primary aim is, again, to provide a snapshot of the library digital market, measuring how digital collections compare to print in title availability and cost and to consider how those factors affect collections.

The data forces us to conclude, reluctantly, that not only does print still offer libraries a far better bang-per-book than digital, but that for most popular titles, digital collections are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Some smaller and independent publishers are, however, now more likely to be present in the market and offer some hope for long-term and cost-effective holdings.

Read the Complete Article (about 8000 words + 3 Charts)

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