Philly.com (the website of Philadelphia's two newspapers), published
an article today about the struggle the Free Library of Philadelphia has with eBooks. Specifically, their publishers.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Philly.com
The book-crammed Free Library of Philadelphia has found a way to stay relevant in the 21st century: ebooks. Last year, 28 percent of the Free Library’s total circulation of more than five million books came from ebooks and other digital content.
But it hasn’t been nirvana for the library and its taxpayer-funded peers.
As popularity soars, publishers and content providers have adopted “metered access” and per-checkout models for ebooks and other content. Those models are guzzling library cash and resulting in book-lending inefficiencies, library officials warn. A so-called perpetual ebook license for libraries could be four or five times the cost of either the printed book or the digital copies sold to consumers.
[...] At the Free Library in 2018, the five most popular ebooks were The Woman in the Window (1,482 ebooks circulated), Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (1,448), The Midnight Line: Jack Reacher Series (1,415), The Handmaid’s Tale (1,406), and Come Sundown (1,311). |
It's a pretty good article about how expensive eBooks have become for libraries.