Note: This article is based on the TEDx Talk by Jeffrey Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator at the Penn State University Libraries. Look for the embedded video at the end of the post.
Have you ever “purchased” an ebook? Most of us have, building digital libraries with the click of a button. But would it surprise you to learn that it’s impossible to actually buy an ebook? When you click “buy,” you aren’t acquiring a piece of property. You are merely paying for a license to access the text.
While this seems like a minor distinction for an individual reader, this shift from ownership to access has created a profound and expensive crisis for the libraries and universities that provide knowledge to us all. The digital convenience we enjoy hides a broken system that impacts how we fund, create, and share information.
1. You Don’t Buy Ebooks, You Merely License Them
The fundamental difference between a physical book and an ebook lies in ownership. When you buy a print book, U.S. copyright law, and copyright laws in other countries as well, affirms that it becomes your personal property. You can lend it, resell it, or keep it forever. The publisher has no further claim on it.
However, when you pay for an ebook, you are only purchasing a license, a set of permissions to read the text under the publisher’s terms. As the internet grew, publishers realized that if consumers could buy and resell digital files as easily as physical books, their profit margins would evaporate. They made an astute decision: they chose not to sell ebooks at all. This shift from true ownership to temporary access is the root of a systemic problem, converting books from personal property into a controlled service.
2. Your Library’s Collection Is Disappearing Every Day
To illustrate the tangible, daily loss that results from the ebook licensing model, Jeffrey Edmunds asks us to imagine a bizarre scenario: a van pulls up to your local library. Several people enter, consult a list, and proceed to pull thousands of books from the shelves, load them into the van, and drive away. This scenario, which sounds like theft, illustrates the tangible reality of the licensing model.
Because libraries only license their digital collections, they do not truly own them. As a result, they are “compelled to remove thousands, tens of thousands, and some months even hundreds of thousands of eBooks” from their catalogs when licensing agreements change or expire. The digital shelves are emptying every single day.
“…that is bizarre as far as that scenario sounds it plays out in essence every single day not only here at Penn State but at libraries all over the country as the result of the shift in our collections from books to ebooks.”
3. We Pay for Knowledge Twice: Once to Create It, and Again to Access It
The economics of scholarly publishing are, in a word, absurdist. Consider how new knowledge is created. Public and university funds, through our tuition, taxpayer dollars, and grants, pay the salaries of scholars. Scholars do research, they write manuscripts, those manuscripts are passed to peers who then make comments, and the comments are passed back to the authors who then revise their manuscripts to improve them. All of this intellectual labor is done at universities.
This finished product, a culmination of publicly funded work, is then handed over to one of five major publishers (according to the PublishingState.com): the RELX Group (Elsevier), Springer Nature, Wiley (John Wiley & Sons), Taylor & Francis, and SAGE Publishing. These publishers then license that very same knowledge back to the public and the universities that created it “at enormous cost.” To put this in perspective, the Penn State libraries spent over $13 million on ebooks and other electronic resources in a single year. This means the public’s investment, through tuition and taxes, is used first to create the knowledge and then a second time to rent it back, perpetuating a financially broken system.
4. Publishers Force Libraries Into Unfair “All-You-Can-Eat” Deals
The scholarly publishing market is controlled by what Edmunds calls a “five-publisher oligopoly.” This lack of competition allows them to leverage their advantage in several unfair ways. First, the cost of ebooks is artificially high, often costing more to license than to buy the print version outright. Second, these costs have risen much faster than the rate of inflation for decades.
This is compounded by anti-competitive business practices. Publishers force libraries into “all-you-can-eat” deals, bundling content so libraries must license “thousands and even tens of thousands of ebooks that we neither want nor need” just to access a few critical titles. Imagine going to the grocery store for your favorite cereal, only to be told you must buy one of every single cereal in the aisle. Finally, publishers include non-disclosure clauses in their contracts, preventing libraries from discussing prices with each other. These tactics create an opaque and anti-competitive market where libraries, stewards of public knowledge, are forced to operate in the dark, unable to negotiate fair terms for the communities they serve.
5. A Solution Exists: Treating Knowledge as a Public Good
The way to correct this broken system is to reframe our thinking. What if we treated the knowledge that we collectively fund and create not as a private commodity, but as a “public good” like roads, bridges, or clean water? This model, known as Open Access, is already proving its value.
- The journal Lingua, published by the giant Elsevier, costs libraries over $2,500 a year. Disgusted with the pricing model, its editors left and started Glossa—a journal covering the same topic with the same high quality, except it is completely free and openly accessible to all.
- The concept also applies to textbooks through Open Educational Resources (OER). Textbook costs have risen over 1,000% in the last 40 years. A 2022 Penn State study found that 65% of students have skipped buying a required textbook due to cost, and nearly a third—31%—have elected not to take a course because the materials were too expensive.
- In response, the Penn State Open Textbook Library now offers over 1,500 textbooks across all disciplines that are free to access online and freely adaptable. This means a professor can find a book, remove or rewrite chapters to perfectly suit their course, and then provide that customized version to students for free.
Conclusion: The Real Value of Information
The current scholarly publishing model is a broken system, built on turning shared knowledge into a private commodity. It is economically unsustainable for the institutions we rely on for education and discovery. Moving forward requires us to reclaim the value of information not for profit, but for the public good. As Jeffrey Edmunds concludes, the stakes are higher than just library budgets.
“Democracy demands an informed citizenry and informed citizens must have free and Equitable and open access to information and to knowledge especially the knowledge that we’ve collectively funded and created. Knowledge is not a private commodity to be handed off to some third party knowledge is a public good and it must be treated as such.”
Watch the video here:
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Mick Canning
There’s a lot to unpack in this. Clearly, an author needs to be rewarded for the time and effort required to write and publish a book but, equally, a model such as the e-book model of licensing described here is wholly unjust (and how much of that money does the author see anyway?). Text books cost a lot of money, and it’s easy to see why students would prefer to access an e-book if it is much cheaper.
In an ideal world, all of these textbooks would be free, but somewhere along the line someone needs to be paid to collate, present and regularly update the information they contain. All the textbooks I have ever owned have been physical, and they were certainly not cheap to buy. Partly, this was because they were not cheap to produce. Before the internet that was all there ever was. Hard up students bought second hand copies, or shared with others, since there was no alternative. Certainly, some missed out because of this. In that same ideal world, there would be a system whereby those who could afford to pay, paid. And those that couldn’t received support.
Finally, I don’t know whether this is a situation unique to the US or worldwide.
Mick Canning
I should also add I was totally unaware of all this before reading your post.