Philly.Com Article about the Struggle of Libraries with eBooks

[Apparition B5]

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.

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.

[SteveEisenberg]

As I've posted before, I live just outside Philadelphia. The handsome suburban public library near me, which houses 30,000 books, and doesn't even have a dedicated community room, had a US$3 million expansion/renovation a few year ago. That price came to $100 / book. Philadelphia is, by some measures, America's most impoverished large city, and necessity forces them to do things a bit more efficiently. Still, when you add together costs of real estate, utilities, salaries and benefits of staff involved in book circulation, and other costs I must be forgetting, the $16-$17 price they quote for a paper book is a small fraction of the real cost to the library. With eBooks, the library does have to pay staff to select the titles, and to investigate whether to go with Overdrive and/or Cloud Library, and even to talk to newspaper reporters about eBooks. So eBook staff cost isn't zero. But it is far lower than with paper books. So I find the 16 cents per loan price they quote, for a paper book loan, misleading.

Most books I borrow from the Free Library of Philadelphia are reserved on the web and then physically transported, from the central library, or sometimes one of the large regional branches, to the small branch I can walk to. So there's another paper-only cost not included in the 16 cents -- physical book transportation.

If it is cheaper for the library to stock a thousand more physical titles than a thousand more Overdrive titles, they probably should do the former -- especially if the economics allow a fair portion of the physical titles to be large print. However, I'd be surprised if the $84 for a perpetual eBook license isn't cheaper, all costs taken into account, than the $16.80 quoted in the article as the paper price.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

If it is cheaper for the library to stock a thousand more physical titles than a thousand more Overdrive titles, they probably should do the former -- especially if the economics allow a fair portion of the physical titles to be large print. However, I'd be surprised if the $84 for a perpetual eBook license isn't cheaper, all costs taken into account, than the $16.80 quoted in the article as the paper price.

Going by my local library, the paper price is not quite perpetual as well. Popular books tend to wear out quite rapidly and need to be repaired/replaced. Very often a book that is beyond economic repair is simply scrapped and not replaced which does help keep the collection size down.