Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC.
Calls for cheaper e-books are longstanding.
In 2014, Coun. Tim Tierney led a group of municipalities asking the federal government to investigate the publishing industry for e-book pricing. At the time, OPL was spending about 11 per cent of its materials budget on electronic content.
By 2023, that share had grown to about 40 per cent.
While the library's spending on e-books is trending upward, the number of copies in its collection has declined slightly since reaching a peak in 2020.
The library is getting less for more — and readers are left waiting longer.
[…]
In addition to high prices, Chevreau said the "big five" multinational e-book publishers "throttle" access to e-books by selling them to libraries for either a limited time or a limited number of circulations — sometimes both.
Those publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book.
Libraries
'Astronomical' hold queues on year's top e-books frustrate readers, libraries
in CBC News‘If there’s nowhere else to go, this is where they come’: how Britain’s libraries provide much more than books
in The GuardianThis is quite touching. If I had my time over, I'd be a librarian.
Part of the magic of a library, as I was reminded over and over again in the days I spent at Battle during winter and spring, is its capaciousness as social infrastructure. It is very important, Giles said to me that Thursday, that there is “somewhere where everybody can come”. In its disparity of needs and personalities and ages sharing a common space, its tolerance and resilience, the modern library has the potential to feel, as it did on that wintry morning of the quiz, like nothing so much as a big and rackety family.
The trouble comes when libraries – and the underpaid, overstretched people who work in them – start to become sole providers for all these things: when years of cost-cutting mean that the state has effectively reneged on all but the most unavoidable of its responsibilities to the troubled, the poor, the educationally challenged, the lonely, the physically unwell, the lost or the homeless. “We risk becoming a social care safety net,” said Nick Poole, the outgoing CEO of the library association Cilip, and “our staff are not clinical staff”.
[…]
Do you ever feel intimidated? I asked Giles one day. “Yeah – occasionally,” she said. Libraries have a largely female workforce. There is a policy at Central that no one should work alone, but female staff can still feel vulnerable. In his eye-opening 2017 memoir about working at a regional library, Reading Allowed, Chris Paling told the story of a reader, “the Thin Man”, who took to stalking a female library assistant home.
That Saturday, lunchtime was a challenge. Staff had 15 minutes, but Curran was struggling to give everyone a break while making sure no one was on a desk alone. “It hurts the head,” he said. Eventually he solved it by getting less than five minutes himself – which he used to make Giles a cup of tea. They passed each other in front of visas and Curran gave Giles a shoulder bump. Giles rolled her eyes, tolerantly, at me. She had a cold she could not shake, but had gone into work anyway. “I wish people knew,” Giles had said to me one day about Battle, “just how much effort we put in. I think we would like it to mean more to people.” It’s a point that comes up among library staff again and again.
The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case
in WiredIn a statement, Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland expressed disappointment “in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”
Dave Hansen, executive director of the Author’s Alliance, a nonprofit that often advocates for expanded digital access to books, also came out against the ruling. “Authors are researchers. Authors are readers,” he says. “IA’s digital library helps those authors create new works and supports their interests in seeing their works be read. This ruling may benefit the bottom line of the largest publishers and most prominent authors, but for most it will end up harming more than it will help.”
The Internet Archive’s legal woes are not over. In 2023, a group of music labels, including Universal Music Group and Sony, sued the archive in a copyright infringement case over a music digitization project. That case is still making its way through the courts. The damages could be up to $400 million, an amount that could pose an existential threat to the nonprofit.
Paramount Is Taking Down Decades Worth of Old TV Clips from the Web
in IndieWireA rep for Paramount told IndieWire: “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”
For now though, many of these series are not currently available on Paramount+, such as “The Colbert Report” or “The Nightly Show.” Even “The Daily Show” has only two of the most recent seasons, encompassing 2024 and 2023, available, despite decades of the show’s history. “South Park” clips used to be hosted on Comedy Central’s website, but the only place to watch full episodes of those are via Max, not Paramount+.
The likely reason for this? Cost cutting. In a town hall this week, Paramount’s “Office of the CEO” including co-chiefs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins, expressed plans to save $500 million in order to stave off profit drops and one day make Paramount+ profitable.
The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts
in The GuardianToday, the ownership of digital books is routinely denied to libraries. Many books are offered to libraries in electronic form only, under restrictive temporary licenses; libraries can never own these e-books, but must pay for them over and over, as if they were Netflix movies.
Some publishers have even explicitly named libraries as direct economic competitors.
Digital books have been removed from libraries and edited without librarians’ knowledge or consent. Library patrons who borrow digital books can no longer have the expectation of privacy, with large publishers, distributors and e-book retailers snooping over the shoulder of every reader to build databases that can be sold or shared with advertisers, law enforcement, landlords or immigration agents.