We had an interesting situation at Yukon College Library recently. One of our management staff members asked if we could purchase a book which he later intended to pass to the Senior Executive Committee (the infamous SEC) for a quick read. Nothing new with that, except for the fact that the recommendation was for an e-book that seemed to be only available through Amazon. And that is when a simple purchase request started revealing a hidden problem concerning e-books acquisition.
E-books in libraries are not exactly a novelty. Public libraries acquire them all the time, and so do academic libraries. Yukon College Library subscribes to a database exclusively for e-books (Ebsco Ebooks) and we have made the effort to include more electronic resources in our books collection. The challenge that is not apparent here is the fact that ownership of an e-book does not exist; what exists is a license to access the content. This small distinction makes all difference for libraries: libraries can only purchase e-books that are available under an institutional license which allows lending an item multiple times. While there are some providers that specialize in this type of license, Amazon, Google Books, Apple iBooks and other popular distributors only describe a “single user model” in their terms of use. That means libraries cannot buy an e-book from Amazon and lend the same book to different users (libraries can lend a Kindle, but that is topic for a different discussion). It also means that users cannot donate e-books to a library, as you can see in this post from the American Library Association. Kind of weird, eh?
This situation translates in some obstacles for how libraries operate their e-book collections. The obvious issue is that sometimes libraries cannot easily buy e-books on popular demand, due to licensing restrictions. Other issues arise in terms of availability of e-books for purchase: in the academic setting, e-books are not the norm for all fields; publishers will not necessarily make several formats available for every publication, and even when they do, pricing is not always an advantage comparing to the printed option. If you add the possible approaches about electronic licenses to the mix (subscription x perpetual licensing, single access x multiple access, among other peculiarities), you have a complex scenario in which buying an e-book is anything but just “buying a book”.
It was kind of strange telling to our patron that we, as a library, could not provide access to the e-book he wanted, but that he, as an individual, was allowed to do buy the e-book and lend it (to a very limited number of people, yes, but at least it was still possible). Just some of the ironies of dealing with information in the electronic realm.