What Can 100,000 Books Tell Us about the International Public Library e-lending Landscape?

Abstract

Introduction: We investigated the relative availability of e-books to libraries for e-lending in five English-language countries, and analysed their licence terms and prices. Method: We created a unique dataset recording author, publisher, price and terms for 100,000 titles and 388,045 e-lending licences across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and United Kingdom via aggregator Overdrive. We developed new algorithms to estimate the original publication year for each title, and to match titles across jurisdictions.Analysis: We examined the relationships between title price, age, terms, jurisdiction, publisher and publisher type using various statistical analyses and machine learning. Results: Price and licence differences across countries are largely attributable to ‘Big 5’ publishers. Prices are largely independent of title age (unless the title is in the public domain) or the rights libraries obtain in exchange. Licence terms are not affected by age either, meaning that the most restrictive terms are often applied to older, less demanded books. Conclusions: By setting terms independent of titles’ value to libraries, publishers may discourage libraries from adding older and less-demanded books to their collections. We will test this hypothesis in a follow-up library survey.

Untitled

“…These results are charted at Figure 2. These ratios were substantially different to those we detected in our control dataset of 94,328 titles (the 'large-scale sample') developed in our related work. 109 There, we found very high degrees of overlap in the books that were available in two pairs of countries: Australia with NZ, and the US with Canada. On that large-scale sample, 99.7% of the books available to NZ public libraries were also available to Australian ones, and 99% of the books available to Australian public libraries were also available to NZ ones.…”

“…In related work studying the relative availability of more than 94,000 titles across five countries, we found that Australia and NZ had exceptionally high degrees of overlap in the ebooks available to their libraries, as did the US and Canada. 89 That is, in each of those two country pairings, identical titles were available and unavailable at close to identical rates. However, the countries in each pair have different copyright terms.…”

University presses' e‐book dissemination strategies for academic library customers: An exploratory study

“…Zhang and Senchyne (2017), by applying the framework of cultural commodity, discussed the different ways publishers could use to affect the price of library e‐books; Bergström et al (2017) published a comprehensive report on the e‐book market in Sweden, including a section on publishers' attitudes towards library e‐books; similarly, Fu, Zhang, and Yan (2018) surveyed the scholarly publishers in China to investigate their attitudes and practices of entering library e‐book market. Giblin et al (2019) compared the availability, licensing and prices of about 10,000 e‐book titles in public library landscape across five countries, by aggregating data from Overdrive, which is the leading e‐book aggregator in the public library market. The study reveals that publishers were adopting a “one‐size fits all” model for the e‐books' availability, price and licenses, where little changes can be found across different libraries.…”

Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia

“…The issue of e-book availability and the limited rights of libraries to lend e-books was also confirmed in a more recent study by Giblin at al. [39].…”