E-Books + Access over Ownership = A Pretend Price Panacea

NPR had a story about e-books in libraries this morning. For a quick news story, they did pretty good. Soon after the story mentioned dubious claim that libraries could save money by using e-books, it mentioned the difficulties and costs of e-books.

To recap:

• Many (most) e-books are not purchases. The content disappears when the library stops sending money.
• E-books are provided to libraries through licensing agreements, and e-book providers put restrictions on their use that they can't put on physical books. The big one is lack of interlibrary loan. 
• E-book prices for libraries aren't like e-book prices for individuals or prices for print books. They can be much higher. 

At public libraries, they are more willing to compromise on the lease vs. buy, access vs. ownership issue than academic libraries are. They know that at some point, their copies of Harry Potter will stop flying off the shelf and may need to be removed to make space for the Next Big Thing.

Academic research libraries, at least traditionally, have taken it upon themselves to worry about maintaining a record of the past, and not just what's popular now. Lack of money is pushing libraries like Morris Library to move away from that model of an academic research library and archive and toward being just an academic access library. To do that, the library pays for what is most needed and most used and borrows or leases the rest. The obscure and the unpopular can be borrowed via interlibrary loan or got some other way. If someone else will be the archive, lack of interlibrary loan on e-books, combined with the lack of ownership is a problem. There has to be a "someone else" out there that can supply the material at a reasonable price. 

CARLI, the consortium behind I-Share, is working on consortial purchasing or licensing of e-books. That approach can certainly improve the access to a wider range of content than individual libraries could get on their own, as at least there's a form of interlibrary sharing among consortium members. The consortial approach doesn't guarantee a price reduction, though.

Academic libraries are developing best practice guidelines to encourage publishers to license e-books with the same benefits and limitations as print; interlibrary loan is fine; simultaneous use by more than one person costs more; and access to content is for the long-term and isn't a year-by-year payment.
 
At SLA last year, one of the sessions I went to described e-book licensing as a jungle, similar to what journal licensing was fifteen years ago. The short version of the journal licensing story as that libraries have done pretty well at pushing publishers (with some exceptions) toward licensing restrictions that work for academic libraries, except for the price issue.

The starry-eyed optimism from the early years of the Web that technology would make journal publishing cheap, and therefore journal content would be cheap is laughable today. It would be nice to think that librarians would have learned from that experience to be more cautious about believing that switching to e-content would save money. In the past month, I've heard librarians make that claim, so I know we haven't all learned that lesson.

If academic libraries are to do more with less through cooperative collection development and also are to save money on space and shelf maintenance through e-books, something has to change.