The Price of Reading: Libraries Take On the Big Five Over Digital Books
I remember the first time I borrowed a book from the public library in Medellín. I was twelve, and it was a collection of García Márquez stories my mother couldn't afford to buy. The librarian handed it over with the easy calm of someone giving away something priceless, and I read it on a park bench with the smell of recent rain in the air. I wasn't thinking about licenses or platform pricing. I was just reading.
That memory came back this week when five of the largest public library organizations in North America published a joint letter to the Big Five publishers: the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, the Public Library Association, and the Urban Libraries Council. The message was simple and urgent: the current digital licensing model has become unsustainable — and for many small libraries, impossible.
Director Angela Goodrich revealed a figure that sounds like dystopian fiction: some large library systems now spend over 50% of their collections budget on digital licensing, a cost that barely existed eight years ago. It's not that e-books are inherently expensive. It's that publishers — and platforms — have built a model where libraries can never own anything. They rent and re-rent access to the same books they could once buy once and lend forever.
The organizations aren't asking for charity. They're asking to negotiate perpetual-use options and usage-based lending contracts. They're asking, in the most basic terms, for digital books to work like paper books: you buy it, you lend it, it wears out, you replace it. The Big Five — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan — have spent years resisting changes to a system that profits them handsomely.
At its core, this debate is the same one literature has always had: who gets to access culture? Only those who can afford it? What about someone in a rural town with no bookshop? A student, an elderly person, someone without a credit card? Clarice Lispector wrote that «reading is not walking on words: it is a practice of identity.» If that's true, then denying a rural library fair access to digital books isn't just a pricing problem. It's a decision about whose reading identity matters. About who counts.
Libraries have been democracy's answer to that question for centuries. The digital world shouldn't be any different. If you live near a library, now is a good time to remember that what it does — lending books without asking for anything in return — is not obvious. It's political. And worth defending.
