E-books and library budgets

From today's *Philadelphia Inquirer*, here's an article on what libraries
pay to provide e-books.  Librarians in the audience may have comments.  The
article has some relevance to university and town budget decisions, so I'm
copying the text below.

Dan

*Ebooks seem like ‘Netflix for libraries,’ but they’re a drain on budgets*
by Bob Fernandez, January 17, 2019

The book-crammed Free Library of Philadelphia has found a way to stay
relevant in the 21st century: ebooks. Last year, 28 percent of the Free
Library’s total circulation of more than 5 million books came from ebooks
and other digital content.

As popularity soars, publishers and content providers have adopted “metered
access” and per-checkout models for ebooks and other content. That’s *guzzling
library cash and resulting in book-lending inefficiencies*, library officials
warn. A so-called perpetual ebook license for libraries could be four or
five times the cost of either the printed book or the digital copies sold to
consumers.

And these are only some of the latest clashes over digital licensing as
publishers seek to squeeze more profits out of their content as the world
moves away from ink and paper.
“Digital content is a huge challenge for libraries," said Michael
Blackwell, the director of the St. Mary’s county library in Maryland and
project director for readersfirst, a loose federation of “nearly 300
libraries" (including the Free Library) dedicated to ensuring that readers
have access to "free and easy-to-use ebook content.”

“We are trying to be reasonable but we think the large publishers are not
pricing ebooks fairly,” Blackwell said. "I don’t think [publishers] want to
look bad to the public but they also don’t want to explain a lot to us."

With metered access, publishers tie the digital license for an ebook to a
time period such as a year or two, or a specific number of checkouts. Once
either of those numbers is met, the library must purchase the ebook title
again or it vanishes from the digital stacks like ephemera.

*‘Perpetual License’*

Publishers also sell ebooks on licensing deals that aren’t metered but
priced significantly higher than print editions. This is called a perpetual
license. Librarians refer to them as “pretend it’s print.”

*Verses for the Dead* by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, a current top
New York Times bestseller, was selling on wednesday on amazon for $16.80
for the hardcover book. But the Free Library said the perpetual license was
$84. Amazon listed the hardback for *Circe*, also a New York Times
bestseller, for $16.20; the perpetual ebook license, $81.

[NB *Circe* is by Madeleine Miller, Brown University  BA and MA in
Classics. News report: "She lives in Narbeth, PA with her husband and two
children. The Song of Achilles was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction and
has been translated into twenty-five languages."]

Two big publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, did not
respond to emails on the topic. A spokeswoman for the Association of
American Publishers declined to comment. The association’s most recent data
shows that ebooks revenues declined 2.8 percent in 2018, which did not
include December sales. Over the same period last year, hardback sales rose
6.5 percent to $2.9 billion. Paperback and mass market sales rose 2 percent
to $2.5 billion.

Librarians say they understand that publishers would like to maximize the
revenue from hot titles. But library patrons also would like to read books,
magazines and other content on digital formats. Librarians believe that
book lending can boost author exposure, thus helping publishers in the long
run.

“Some publishers believe that engaging with libraries loses money for
them,” said Alan Inouye, senior director of public policy and government
relations at the American Library Association, said …. But *“libraries do a
lot of marketing for authors,”* he added. [DPT: you bet!]

And with libraries concerned that relations with publishers are heading in
the wrong direction, publishers, library organizations and  other
stakeholders launched the Panorama Project last May to gather data from
library services such as Overdrive to determine whether libraries hurt or
help publishers.

At the Free Library in 2018, the five most popular ebooks were *The Woman
in the Window*(1,482 ebook circulation), *Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump
White House* (1,448 circulation), *The Midnight Line: Jack Reacher Series*
(1,415), *The Handmaid’s Tale* (1,406) and *Come Sundown* (1,311).

*Metering access*

Jennifer Maguire-Wright, the chief of the materials management division at
the Free Library, tracks checkouts and holds to help her determine the
number of copies of a book to purchase. She said that the metered access
ebook copies of *The Woman in the Window* cost $26.99 with 26 checkouts, or
$1.04 per checkout. After 26 checkouts, the ebook license expires and the
library had to purchase another one.

A printed copy of *The Woman in the Window*, meanwhile, cost $16.40 on
amazon on wednesday. The Free Library negotiates a slight discount to the
market price but declined to disclose the discount. An average circulation
for a printed book is about 100 check outs, though of course that can vary
with time and usage. At the maximum number of about 100 checkouts, the book
circulates for about 16 cents per checkout.

Maguire-Wright and other library officials acknowledge that publishers had
consumer data for pricing that libraries did not. But they also believe
that the availability of ebooks for library patrons improved over the years.

“We still need to budget for things that don’t circulate and we just have
here for reference material,” Maguire-Wright said, noting that she did not
see a day when ebook and digital costs would be a higher percentage of the
Free Library’s budget than its share of total circulation (28 percent).
Free Library, which has 54 branches across the region and more than 640,000
cardholders, had a 2017 materials budget of $4.5 million. Laverne Mann, the
Director of the Cherry Hill Public Library, said there are many benefits to
ebooks and digital content. Any ebook can be transformed into a large-print
book on a screen, a big plus for older readers. Content can be downloaded
24/7. And community reading lists can be made easily available to everyone
without visiting the library. Thousands of additional titles — magazines,
books and even foreign language books — are available through digital
platforms, she said.

Recently the Library reached a deal to make 20,000 digital copies of the
New York Times available to Cherry Hill public library patrons for 72 hours
through a special access code, another example of a publisher experimenting
with a new economic model — after 72 hours, readers would need a new code.

In 2018, the … library spent $46,000 on digital content out of a total
materials budget of $175,000, … Mann said. Digital usage rose 5.7 percent
in 2018 over 2017 and accounted for about 14 percent of all circulation
last year, she added. She expects total digital usage to climb about two
percentage points a year.

Cherry hill also makes the hoopla service available for ebooks, audio
books, tv shows, movies, comics and music at a per-checkout charge that can
range between 70 cents and about $4. Tierney Miller, the reference and
adult services supervisor at the … library, described hoopla as “Netflix for
libraries” because there are unlimited copies simultaneously available to
borrowers.

So that it doesn’t bust the library’s budget, cherry hill restricts members
to five checkouts a month, with a maximum charge of $3.99. "It’s a cash
guzzler, but we love it,” Miller said. Hoopla is so popular, in fact, that
the library caps its daily usage at $100. After hitting the cap, the
service shuts off for the day.