Most libraries don’t own their own ebooks. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to LJ readers, yet it’s a statement that continues to confound elected officials and administrators who get an astounding amount of say in how much money public and academic libraries are allotted.

This is one of the reasons I, along with my coauthors Sarah Lamdan, Michael Weinberg, and Jason Schultz at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at New York University (NYU) Law, published our recent report, The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy: How Publishers and Platforms Have Reshaped the Way We Read in the Digital Age. In nearly 60 pages, this report takes a hard look at how license agreements dictate what consumers—both individual and institutional—get to do with their digital book collections.

Much of the legal and economic analysis had already been drafted by the time Lamdan, Weinberg, and Schultz reached out to me last fall. They told me they were looking to bring in a journalist who could speak with stakeholders who worked in publishing, with platforms, and in librarianship to learn why consumers cannot own, but only license, ebooks. Together, we identified 20 subject participants we hoped to interview over a six-week period. These included employees of Big Five publishers and smaller presses—including some academic presses—who held positions we suspected would be familiar with the business of ebooks; executive leadership at commercial and library ebook vendors; and librarians at public and academic institutions who specialized in acquisitions and collection development. Many initial requests to participate in the study went unanswered, which led us to quickly adopt the snowball sampling method, where I asked participants for recommendations or assistance connecting us with other research participants, and extending the time of our research study period to accommodate some participants’ busy schedules. In the end, we ended up speaking with closer to 40 participants.

We asked them about ebook markets, platforms, and data analytics, knowing that some people would be able to speak more about one or two topics, but maybe not all three. What crystallized from the responses is that when it comes to ebooks, for-profit publishers have made a collective decision to shift to offering an array of limited-use licenses for a series of economic, legal, technical, and psychological reasons pertaining to the belief that limiting or eliminating digital ownership of books will raise publisher revenues, forestall free copies leaking onto unauthorized websites, and allow publishers and platforms unprecedented control over people’s private reading lives.

Most interviewees took issue with our inquiry into why consumers cannot own and can only license ebooks, either because it doesn’t take into account the fact that some independent publishers have sold ebooks directly to libraries, which is true, or because they didn’t feel ownership was relevant. However, when it comes to the Big Five commercial publishers and platform behemoths such as Amazon and OverDrive, the overarching research question was taken as a challenge to a business model that reaps profits off potentially misleading advertising like Amazon’s “Buy now with 1-Click” button that customers see when they want to read an ebook through the Kindle app. It was also seen as a challenge to the business model that has libraries paying more for limited use licenses in the long run than they probably would for a print copy of a book.

We anonymized the interviews with study participants because, in the end, the majority of interviewees asked to be treated as anonymous sources due to a fear of retaliation from their workplace or their industry at large. Members of our Institutional Review Board also characterized the subjects we were speaking with as members of a vulnerable population, whose participation in the research could lead to employment-related risks. The coauthors of our report believe that the findings obtained through these interviews could offer those in the publishing and purchasing industries and their workers insight into how lack of digital ownership may have negative consequences for individual and institutional consumers in the long term. We also found it concerning that some of the large companies were unwilling to talk about their business practices with researchers affiliated with an academic institution, and feel that consumers at the individual and institutional level should have access to this information that could help them make informed purchasing decisions.

Though the report, published in mid-July, has been met with enthusiasm, it is notably dense—as a coauthor, I have yet to be able to give it a full read in one sitting. It also may not be as attention-grabbing as some of the censorship headlines have been as of late. As an independent journalist covering the contemporary issues librarians face, I can’t help but reflect on how the two are interconnected. Last month, a new law in Mississippi prevents minors from accessing the ebooks and databases their school and public libraries have paid for. I would argue this demonstrates just one of the ways that libraries being unable to own their own ebooks hurts consumers—now minors don’t have access to entire digital collections, not just the books politically conservative operatives object to. I suspect these platforms are in a better position to fend off far-right attacks, just as publishers are, but I can’t help but wonder if publishers and platforms can work with libraries to find a better way.

It would be hard to argue at this point that publishers should treat digital books in exactly the same way as physical books. Rather, we feel that regulators should address competition concerns and barriers to entry for the ebook marketplace, that digital ownership should be normalized and distinguished from the platform-controlled licensing of ebooks, and that privacy laws need to be updated to preserve intellectual freedom on ebook platforms.

On October 27, 2023, we hope to build on the report by hosting a full day event at NYU School of Law, where the white paper’s coauthors will be joined by other panelists to discuss the forces that have shaped current ebook licensing models; how these models impact data flows and privacy; and how the relationships between publishers, platforms, and purchasers influence the ecosystem. The event is free and open to the public and registration is now open. For those located outside of New York City, it will be recorded and shared via the Engelberg Center’s podcast a week after the event.

Our takeaways from this study have left us concerned that without additional marketplace competition and the introduction of more digital ownership opportunities for readers, these lock-in practices fueled by platforms and publishers will only continue. We also see a need for privacy laws that protect intellectual freedom to be further developed to reflect the ever-evolving digital book landscape.

Claire Woodcock is a Digital Ownership Fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at the NYU School of Law, as well as an independent journalist who writes about the politics of information. Her work has been picked up by Slate, Vice, NPR, Library Journal, and other national and regional publications.