Raise your hand: Are you, like me, an inveterate e-book consumer from your local library (shoutout to my own local, Austin Public Library!)? If so, here’s a peek behind the curtain about how libraries stock up on e-books by Daniel A. Gross at The New Yorker. You may be surprised.
The process libraries have to go through to get e-books is completely different than buying print books. They don’t simply order however many copies they guesstimate they’d need directly from publishers and then own the actual books. Nope. Instead, libraries have to navigate a tricky two-step:
- Publishers sell distribution rights to their books to third-party vendors.
- The third-party vendors then sell lending rights to libraries.
And these lending rights do come with some odd strings attached:
- They’re more expensive than print books.
- They usually have expiration dates.
- Weirdest of all, publishers are treating libraries differently than other buyers.
And as you might have guessed, digital reading and e-borrows from library have skyrocketed since the pandemic. Gross cites stats from the Denver Public Library for 2020: Digital checkouts increased by 60 percent and DPL spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up 20 percent over 2019.
Naturally, the vendors in the business of selling lending rights to libraries — such as OverDrive (the big kahuna and home of the checkout/reading app Libby), Hoopla, Bibliotheca, Axis 360, and the Digital Public Library of America – are also seeing a surge in value.
But if that all freaks you out, don’t worry – libraries are still ultimately here to serve readers, no matter how they read books. So downloading e-books is just another way to show some library love! (Shoutout to my own local, Austin Public Library!)
Read all about it here: “The Surprisingly Big Business of Library e-Books”
Then tell us what you think about getting ebooks from libraries in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!
