Ottawa libraries fight the high price of e-books

E-books cost nothing to print and transport. Then why do they cost so much for libraries to buy?

That’s the question Ottawa Public Library board chairman Tim Tierney and librarians all across the country want answered.

Tierney says libraries that buy e-books from the “big five” multinational publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster) commonly pay between $89 and $129 a copy.

E-books are not only more expensive than their printed counterparts, but the big publishers also charge libraries three to five times more than they charge ordinary consumers.

The library must order multiple electronic copies of popular books because only one copy can be lent out at a time.

Some publishers limit the number of views of each e-book to 25. For the library, that means that purchasing an e-book amounts to “leasing” it, says Tierney.

An individual e-book purchaser would pay $15.99 for John Grisham’s bestselling Rogue Lawyer — but it costs $85 for a library to purchase as an e-book. James Patterson and David Ellis’ The Murder House costs $14.99 for an individual purchaser and $110 for the library. Friction by Sandra Brown costs $12.99 for an individual and $103 for the library.

There’s a similar price differential for U.S. libraries, which have also flagged e-book prices as an issue.

Meanwhile, e-books from most Canadian publishers cost between $16 and $25 for libraries. It’s not clear why there’s a price difference, says Monique Brûlé, the Ottawa Public Library’s divisional manager of programs and services.

“We would like to be able to sit down with publishers and talk about this, but there has been no progress,” she says.

As the popularity of e-books increases, the Ottawa Public Library’s budget is also shifting. The library has an acquisitions budget of about $4.88 million annually, which has not changed much in the past five years. In 2011, the library spent about $70,000 on ebooks and $3.4 million on printed books. Last year, the library spent $463,000 on e-books and about $3.1 million on printed books.

“Small municipalities are already feeling the pinch. We’re doing OK for now, but there’s going to be a tipping point,” says Tierney.

Neither do e-books help get reading materials into the hands of readers any faster or cheaper. E-book users still have to wait for a copy to become available, and the library has the same 8:1 ratio of holds per copy.

The Ottawa Public Library has 10 copies of The Murder House, for example, and paid $110 for each copy.

There are 84 holds, which means library users who want to read it as an e-book have to wait 24 weeks. The library also has 48 printed copies, and 399 holds. Print readers also have to wait 24 weeks to get a copy.

This summer, the Ottawa Public Library joined www.fairpricingforlibraries.org, a public awareness campaign led by public libraries across the country.

Tierney says he will be seeking city council’s endorsement for a motion requesting that the Department of Canadian Heritage and Industry Canada investigate the publishing industry’s practices during an upcoming review of the Copyright Act. He also plans to bring up that matter at the November meeting of the Ontario Caucus of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, of which he is chairman.

“Municipalities are pressed very hard. We want to be able to tell readers that books are available electronically, but it takes money away from something else. There’s only one pot of money.”