You may remember that beginning November 1, Macmillan Publishers severely limited your access to the Company’s latest eBook titles. Macmillan Publishers limited libraries to purchase only one copy of each new ebook title for the first eight weeks after a book’s release. That’s one copy of the latest Bill O’Reilly or Kristin Hannah title for our entire community of 200,000 residents.
This embargo limits our ability to provide access to the reading materials you want, when you want them. The embargo impacts those who need us the most: Those with mobility issues and low vision, who rely on ebooks for access to the world.
Now that the embargo has been in effect for more than six weeks, what impacts have we seen? Colleen Seisser, Collection Services manager for the Aurora Public Library (APL) said, “In Overdrive we have to hold eContent to a higher holds ratio than physical materials due to the high cost to purchase. Right now, we are at an 8:1 ratio, which means we wait until there are more than eight weeks before adding extra copies. This means longer wait times for customers, and we are not the only library that has to it. Although we would love to lower that ratio to our current 4:1 for print items, we would be spending a considerable amount of our monthly budgets on additional copies due to our current budget constraints.”
What are the financial impacts we see with this embargo? Let’s take The Guardians as an example. We pay $95 for an audiobook copy we own versus $55 for an eBook that expires in 24 months. Why not rely on another digital platform, such as Hoopla? Hoopla cannot offer certain publications because of the way ebooks are licensed. The two biggest publishers that do not offer their titles on Hoopla are MacMillan and Penguin Random House. Some popular titles in 2019 by Penguin Random House includes, The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, and The Guardians by John Grisham. And finally, you might ask, why the Library doesn’t just buy ebooks from Amazon, where they’re a lot cheaper. And the answer is, we can’t: We can buy print books from Amazon and we sometimes do, but there’s no platform for libraries to offer Amazon ebooks to our customers.
Macmillan is the only major publisher to propose such an embargo, although all of the Big Five major publishers restrict library purchases in some way. Macmillan is creating these limits because it believes libraries are “cannibalizing sales” for e-books. Which is far from the truth: Libraries promote books and reading, and research shows that one out of two individuals purchase a book they first borrowed from a library, and that 76% of readers later purchase another title by an author they discovered at a library.
Thank you for your continued support to the Aurora Public Library. We appreciate your patience as we continue to see the impact the embargo has on our users.
Miriam Meza-Gotto is communications manager for Aurora Public Library.