Nashville Public Library is calling out a publisher for raising the cost to lend books electronically. Many U.S. librarians are annoyed over a recent rate hike on e-books, and in Nashville officials are airing that grievance publicly.
Publisher Random House just tripled what it charges libraries for some e-books. Several other publishers refuse to sell e-books to lenders at all. Noel Rutherford manages the collection at Nashville Public Library. She thinks publishers are afraid of the technology, partly based on how online sharing gouged music sales a decade ago.
“I think they’re worried about a loss of market revenue by selling e-books to libraries. But it’s deceiving because really, with the limited check-out period, no different than books – print books – we’ve been doing that for a hundred years without a loss of revenue for the publishers.”
Like a real book, a given e-book can only be checked out to one patron at a time, for up to three weeks. After that, instead of running up a late fee, an e-book just deletes itself from your device.
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Cost per circulation
Rutherford uses a ratio to decide whether a book is worth buying: if the average cost of a book for each time it’s checked out would be more than $4, the library doesn’t buy it. Rutherford says most are far cheaper. She argues because big price hikes will keep the library from buying certain titles, the impact is not on the budget, but the collection.
Rutherford says e-book check-outs have exploded in popularity, with users more than doubling in a year.
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