eBooks in Academic Libraries: Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities By Kara Kroes Li (Director of Product Management, Ebooks, EBSCO) <KKroes@ebsco.com>
T
he pandemic thrust a spotlight on eBooks in libraries, and in doing so highlighted their wondrous conveniences and maddening limitations in almost equal measure. Many of the challenges experienced by libraries — in acquisition, collection management, and the user experience — have seen great progress over the last few years. However, despite the dramatic growth of eBooks in academic libraries, the institutional eBook ecosystem is still constrained by availability and pricing, frustrated by user experience limitations, and burdened by collection management challenges. As an aggregator with a vantage point between libraries and publishers, I share thoughts on where we’re headed, which challenges are likely to be solved, and which might hang around over the long term.
Availability and Pricing Earlier this year, EBSCO surveyed approximately 400 academic libraries to learn what pandemic-induced changes they felt would be permanent. Libraries reported that one of the most universal permanent changes was shifting titles purchased for course reserves to eBook format. Curriculum support, or “curriculum-driven acquisition,” had been a growing trend in response to textbook affordability issues, but its expanded use drove an even greater need for titles in eBook format and expanded access models such as unlimited user and DRM-free. Unfortunately, many publishers withhold their highest-demand content (content with the greatest potential for sales to individuals, like course adoptions) from libraries, so libraries have been unable to transition all of their course reserves to digital. In some cases, if there is a library option available, the cost is prohibitive. To combat this issue, EBSCO has focused on encouraging publishers to make their full catalog available for institutional purchase (in some cases helping them select backlist titles for digitization) and, where possible, to offer unlimited user DRMfree versions. According to GOBI’s data, 74% of titles profiled (relevant to academic libraries) are available as an eBook for libraries, which is up from 50% in 2016. Since EBSCO introduced the aggregator DRM-free eBook model in 2018, with 70,000 titles, the offering has grown to 325,000, including more than 55,000 frontlist titles. We have also seen some gross excesses in eBook pricing, as evidenced by the #ebooksos hashtag. We have worked to educate publishers on the real risks and benefits to library sales, and we encourage them to make, at a minimum, a perpetual single user license available to libraries. Over the last two years, we’ve seen the average unlimited user price drop 13% from a peak in 2019, and the average single user price drop 10% from a peak the same year. Even though we’ve seen a lot of experimentation with pricing by publishers, I believe we will reach an equilibrium for most content — for single-user access at least — that is more acceptable to libraries. The struggle for library availability is coming to a head with new laws passed (and challenged) in Maryland (Albanese), New York, and Rhode Island, as well as with a recent U.S. Senate investigation (Wille) into pricing and licensing terms for libraries. The new laws, which require publishers to sell eBooks to libraries “on reasonable terms” if they make an eBook available to consumers,
12 Against the Grain / February 2022
are being challenged by publishers concerned about the government regulating their ability to profit from copyrighted works. A similar law is being contemplated in Massachusetts (Bray), so this is a growing trend. While this has more to do with public library sales and expiring acquisition models, the tide seems to be turning in favor of libraries seeking eBook terms that align more closely with those of print. While there is likely to be some thrashing as we update our legal system in terms of copyright laws and first sale doctrine for eBooks, I anticipate positive developments for academic-library availability as a result. This means that libraries should be able to procure digital reserves for most content, but probably still won’t be able to purchase inexpensive unlimited-user versions of all requests to relieve students from purchasing their course materials. Even today, publishers are increasingly willing to offer content and models to libraries provided that certain protections are in place either in the form of limited-access models or digital rights management (DRM). At the risk of stating the obvious, any model that directly or dramatically undermines the number of units a publisher can sell will be looked at with scrutiny. If DRM-free unlimited user is not an option (which will always be off the table for certain content), we encourage publishers to at least “Students offer single-user access. There is are accessing very little risk to publishers offering almost double single-user licenses to libraries, because this model approximates the number of the inherent limitations of print. unique titles Penguin Random House is a great as they did example of this compromise — they agreed to sell their full catalog to pre-pandemic academic libraries via EBSCO, but ... This likely we impose limitations to ensure corresponds to that checked-out titles expire and become inaccessible, rather than eBooks being infinitely sharable without DRM. used more We’ve replicated this success prouniversally as curing a perpetual-license option course materials.” with a number of other publishers, including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and numerous independent trade publishers through the Independent Publishers Group. In fact, we now offer more than 180,000 trade titles, which have become a growing percentage of our sales to academic libraries. Maximizing availability for libraries unfortunately requires some tradeoffs in the user experience. Fortunately, as a large aggregator, we can offer a variety of levers for content protection in order to maximize the number of titles available for library purchase. We can control downloading (e.g., none, partial, full, as well as the duration), copy and paste, and of course, simultaneous users. I do foresee us continuing to close the gap in terms of eBook availability, perhaps getting close to 100% of titles in print. Some titles, such as large art books, might be challenging, but most titles should be available with little risk to publishers. But in order to do this, I expect to see variability in content delivery (user experience) over the long term.
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