The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Independent Publishers Group (IPG) today announced a new model that will give libraries ownership rights to ebooks purchased from Austin Macauley, Arcadia Publishing, Dynamite Entertainment, Dover Publications, JMS Books, and dozens of other independent publishers. Under these ownership terms, libraries will have the right to give an ebook to another library or loan it through interlibrary loan, or even update an ebook file to a new format if needed for digital preservation. At launch, about 38,000 titles will be available for purchase under these terms on the nonprofit Palace Marketplace, which was developed in partnership with DPLA and is maintained by Lyrasis. The Palace Marketplace will provide hosting services for these ebooks, although the terms also give an ebook’s owner the right to transfer the ebook to another host—including hosting files locally on a library’s own servers—as long as digital rights management software (DRM) is used to ensure that the ebook is only loaned out to one patron at a time.

“Libraries are meant to provide sustained access to our collections over time,” said Christina de Castell, chief librarian and CEO of Vancouver Public Library, which works with DPLA and the Palace Project. “That’s really the fundamental issue…we need perpetual models.”

More than a decade ago, there was a brief movement toward library ebook ownership led by Califa, Queens Library in New York, and Douglas County Libraries in Colorado. However, those models “didn’t scale well in terms of libraries doing all of the tech work—creating a safe [DRM-secured] environment and managing the ingest of content from publishers,” Micah May, director of ebook services for DPLA, told LJ. Given those inherent challenges, the desire to own digital content “from my perspective, kind of faded from the conversation” for several years, May said, but recently there has been renewed interest. “This is something that Palace [can] do, because we have this platform that we control,” May said. It offers “a scalable way to give libraries what they need in terms of digital ownership without the burden of hosting DRM servers and accepting FTP feeds.”

While major publishers have become more willing to license ebooks to libraries during the past 10 years—with some now making content available through a variety of licensing models—rising costs and the inability to establish permanent digital collections of modern ebooks have posed growing challenges for libraries. “In an ideal world,” de Castell said, libraries “would have a copy that we hold for a long period of time for the purpose of preservation—especially for local content—and we would have [licenses] that address short-term demand. Many books are very hot for the first six months or a year [after publication] and then that demand dissipates. In the long term, we only really need one or two copies that we would want to keep forever—especially for culturally significant titles.”

May noted that many libraries have been forced to start working with differentiated holds ratios in order to keep their digital collections budgets under control—letting holds lists grow for bestsellers from certain publishers based on the cost or value of an ebook license, and directing more of their budget toward ebooks with library-friendly terms. “They’re adjusting their fundamental collections strategy in the sense of not buying as many titles that are not a good deal,” he said. “My hope is that, in the coming years, more libraries will do that, and reward publishers that are offering more library friendly terms.”

May described IPG as “a very library-friendly distributor,” and added that “I would give a lot of credit to DPLA’s law firm, WilmerHale” for writing the agreement. “They did a lot of work...to really craft a careful agreement that balanced the publishers’ and rights-holders’ needs with the libraries’ needs, giving libraries meaningful ownership.”

IPG CEO Joe Matthews said in an announcement, “At IPG, we have always supported libraries and the crucial role they play in providing access, facilitating discovery, and preserving books for the long term. We are proud to help our publishers offer libraries terms that promote these important roles by including the option for libraries to own digital copies of the books they purchase.”

DPLA’s ebook work is supported by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.