The Ottawa Public Library has joined a group of hundreds of fellow Canadian libraries to discourage what they say is price-gouging by some ebook publishers.
Canadian Public Libraries For Fair Ebook Pricing is an alliance formed earlier this year with the goal of informing the public about the higher-than-average prices some publishers tend to charge libraries to offer electronic books to their users.
Monique Brulé, division manager of programs and services at the OPL, says some publishers charge libraries up to five times the price of what an individual consumer would pay for an ebook.
For instance, Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl costs a consumer roughly $16, but a library might pay upwards of $85 for the same ebook, according to the alliance’s website.
Brulé says the issue of price-gouging arose in 2011, when most publishers made their ebooks available to libraries.
She says these prices can cause issues for both the library and its customers.
“If ebooks are priced much higher than print, we have less number of copies for our ebook titles, which means longer waiting lists for customers,” she says.
She also says the demand for ebooks is increasing every year, and in the past eight months, demand has shot up roughly 25 per cent.
Brulé acknowledges that most Canadian publishers charge libraries reasonable prices for ebooks.
“Each publisher has a different pricing model,” she says. “Some publishers will have caps on the number of times you can lend ebooks, others have a lease formula.”
Hachette, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster, a group of publishers known as the “big five” are mainly responsible for over-pricing, she says.
Wendy Newman, a recently retired professor in library advocacy at the University of Toronto, says she believes publishers are price-gouging out of fear. Some publishers are “terrified” after looking at the newspaper business, she explains.
“The basic public expectation is that [people] should be able to read everything for free, and newspapers have got caught in the crossfires of this,” she says. “Ebook producers are worried that if they don’t get a premium price for libraries, that the viability of their business is in endangered.”
The idea that consumers borrow digital copies “for free” and avoid spending money at the bookstore might be what publishers are fearing, according to Newman. She says this could explain why some publishers choose not to sell certain ebooks to libraries at all.
Brulé says the OPL has been working with the Toronto Public Library since 2014 on “ebook advocacy” and getting publishers to negotiate on lower prices and better terms. This September, she says, was ”the right time” to join the fair ebook pricing campaign. Others in the alliance include the Canadian Library Association, which represents over 50,000 library employees across the country, and the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries.
Ana-Maria Critchley, manager of stakeholder relations for the Toronto Public Library, says the TPL faces similar challenges to the OPL.
“Libraries are all about giving people equal access to information and to resources, including books. The pricing for ebooks prevents us from doing that,” she says.
Longer wait times, less selection, and fewer electronic copies are among the issues the TPL is currently facing, according to Critchley.
“Right now what we’ve been focusing on is just raising public awareness, letting people and library customers know that this is an issue for libraries,” she says.
“If you go on our (TPL) website, pretty much any page that you would be checking out an ebook from (has) the link to the Fair Pricing for Ebooks (website),” she says. “We’ve been doing a lot of social media around it, and our city librarian… hosted a Twitter chat at the beginning of the campaign.”
She adds: “We’ll see what the reaction is, which so far seems to be quite supportive, and we’ll regroup and see what the next steps will be.”
Critchley notes the TPL will be meeting with some publishers in the future about libraries’ pricing concerns.
Brulé says the real mission of the fair-pricing campaign is to reach an agreement between libraries and publishers for better terms on ebooks.
“The end goal is really to offer libraries options. So we’re not opposed to paying a higher cost for a copy of a book that we can have in perpetuity,” she says. “But it’s got to be a reasonable price.”