Cheers & Jeers 2025

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The holiday season has rolled round in earth’s diurnal course once more, and that means it’s once again time for the ReadersFirst Working Group’s Annual Cheers & Jeers, wherein we celebrate positive developments in library digital content and blow well-deserved raspberries at the toad-spotted who have complicated the library mission.

Many, many cheers are due in the most significant development in library digital content this year: the (re)emergence of state library ebooks laws.

  • Cheers to Rep. Matt Blumenthal (the special champion), Governor Ned Lamont, and RF friend Ellen Paul (ED of the Connecticut Library Consortium for passing Connecticut’s ebook bill into law. Revamped to avoid the legal challenges facing earlier bills/laws, this law invites negotiations with publishers whose license terms may be unreasonable for libraries (looking at you, Big 5).

    • The bill faced some challenges in legislature, including the usual nonsense about libraries pushing pornography; however, in the spirit of the holidays, we withhold any jeers for that. All’s well that ends well. We cheer the fact that publisher lobbying efforts against the bill were all-but-non-existent. Whether because they feared passage was likely and so not worth fighting or because they invariably get roasted like so many holiday chestnuts when showing up to oppose library legislation in CT, the purveyors of all the usual lies about library digital content were missing.

  • Cheers for special champion Sen. Andrew Zwicker of New Jersey for introducing ebook legislation in New Jersey and to RF friend Michael Maziekien of NJ State Library for careful and thoughtful advocacy. If passed—and for now, it very well could—it would trigger Connecticut's law and two states would have laws in place to ensure ensure reasonable terms. Two is a start!

  • Cheers for Massachusetts’ S.2710 to appoint a commission to investigate the library ebook market. We hope it becomes law. If so, it will follow the usual pattern: once legislators see how badly libraries (and the taxpayer!) are getting the shaft, they understand why we want action.

  • Cheers for the other states in which librarians are working with legislators to advance fair ebook bills. At least 8 others are at some point in the process. Even investigations such as that proposed in Massachusetts would be helpful

  • Related cheers for their great support of legislative efforts:

    • A huge cheer for the work of Kyle Courtney and Juliya Ziskina of the ebook study group. They continue to advise states on consumer protection and state procurement laws to promote fair library digital content, including CT and NJ. Visit the site to join and get draft legislation for your state and to get powerful and intelligent voices in support.

    • A huge cheer for the work of Jennie Rose Halperin, Michelle Reed, and now Layla Maurer of Library Futures for their ongoing advocacy on fair library ebook terms (among many important issues), including starting regional ebook summits.

In the most important issue for librarianship overall—book banning—resounding jeers must ring out. But first let us celebrate a trend:

  • Cheers for even more states passing Freedom to Read legislation this year—Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont—with Massachusetts soon to follow. These especially laws matter for digital. Ebook collections are a bluenose censors’ dream. Imagine banning thousands of books at once—oh, what joy to the censor’s heart to axe entire library collections. Cheers as well for every state that had previously passed laws protecting our Freedom to Read: California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Washington.

  • A HUGE jeer to New York Governor Cathy Hochul for vetoing New York’s Freedom to Read Act. What’s that all about? Looks like you’ll cruise to re-election. You’re helping book banners in a time when Freedom to Read laws have never been more needed, witness:

  • Jeers to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for their most recent decision in Little vs. Llano. Let’s see. They overturn another court’s preliminary injunction, and then overturn a ruling by their own members, not to mention going against a 1995 ruling by the self-same court in order to say that local and state official are free to pull whatever books they don’t like out of libraries on purely political and religious grounds. Hey, no need to put a thumb on the scales of justice when you can just throw the scales aside.

  • Jeers to the Supreme Court of the United States for not hearing Little vs. Llano, thus effectively making government censorship of library materials in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas lawful. It has been pointed out that other cases are pending, including some debunking the fallacy that library collections are simply government speech. Perhaps, it is suggested, the Court will rule to support the freedom to read in a case directly resting on the First Amendment. But why wait? What about library readers in those three states? Let ‘em eat cake? This delay suggests a worst case: an ultra-conservative court majority refusing to hear cases that codify censorship and taking up a case supporting the freedom to read in order to strike precedent down and declare open season of library shelves. Rule they will eventually have to. Should anyone expect the court that brought us Trump vs. United States to strike a blow for libraries against government overreach? We can hope. But states with Freedom to Read laws, get your defenses ready against a hostile ruling that the book banning crowd will crow is a precedent for all fifty states.

  • After this abomination, cheers to Leila Green Little for her courageous fight to Let the People Read.

  • Cheers to EveryLibrary for their Freedom to Read and legislative advocacy (with my colleague Carmi citing their annual roundup as very helpful), Pen America, the American Library Association, Freedom to Read Foundation, Unite Against Book Bans, Authors Against Book Bans, the many, many publishers, and perhaps most important of al, the parents and school children fighting locally and in courts to makes sure all may be represented on library shelves.

  • Cheers, too, to the expansion of Books Unbanned (thanks, Long Beach,, for joining!), and the continuation of the Banned Book Club. Thanks to these efforts, people in every state can read interesting and award-winning books, even if their local officials demand their removal from local libraries. Banning Ebook collections may be a censor’s dream, but they are also the worst nightmare for those who would undermine democratic norms to foster a view that America only belongs to some, not all.

My colleague Micah sends hearty cheers to Abdo Publishing, Books in Motion, Ebound and Dreamscape Media for beginning to offer libraries the ability to purchase and OWN their titles. Cheers, too, to the Palace Project for offering a sire to host what we can own, this making ownership easier and more sustainable. I add cheers to all medium-sized, smaller, and Indie publishers who offer libraries licenses that approximate or sometimes even surpass the deals we get on print books. Meet many of them at IndieLIb 2026 (thanks, Independent Publishers Caucus!) These cheers must inevitably be followed by jeers to the Big 5 and big academic presses who price ebooks in increasingly unsustainable ways. As we document in our Publishers Price Watch, Penguin Random House and Macmillan at least held the line this year—thanks, but no cheers—and Simon & Schuster weren’t too bad, but Hachette and Harper Collins, boo on you! Why can’t you all be like Scholastic, offering good content at fair library digital prices? RF encourages all libraries to reward those who offer use fair terms and cut back on books from those who don’t, while letting the public know why and joining state efforts for fair library digital laws. We’ve helped to build the confining edifice that hurts us. Let’s start breaking it down even more in 2026.

He adds jeers to B&T (not the unfortunate front line, but corporate management) for driving their business into bankruptcy, leaving many libraries stranded and scrambling to try and continue serving books they thought they had perpetually purchased; however, since they did not own the titles, many may be lost.

Cheers to Andrew Albanese for starting up Words & Money, a fair and very much informed look at the intersection of libraries and publishing with great coverage of digital developments. I urge subscriptions (and have no connection and receive no benefit other than having a good site continue.)

My colleague Lisa adds many cheers and jeers:

  • Cheers to OverDrive for supporting libraries to get more reads to readers by reducing hold delays.

  • Cheers to all the Internet Archive signatories https://ourfuturememory.org/, aiming “to safeguard the essential digital activities of libraries, archives, and museums (collectively referred to as ‘memory institutions), while ensuing “these institutions retain the same rights and responsibilities online that they have historically held offline.”

  • Cheers to Brooklyn PL for creating a library materials reading app to show private equity ereaders an integrated reader is what library's need https://www.bklynlibrary.org/bpl-mobile-app

  • Cheers to NYPL and Brian Bannon for highlighting that e-content access is about accessibility, preference and READING! https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/audiobooks-books-print-reading.html [Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and audiobooks do count as reading. While we’re at it, then, two-cheers to Audible for making content available through Palace. Do you want the full three? Of course you do! Pick up the pace at which they are offered and give us some better terms.]

  • Jeers to those who continue to block access to content for public library users, including [perhaps especially?] Netflix and Prime.

  • Jeers to AI content published without clear transparency. [Let’s add jeers to ebook platforms that add A.I. slop to their offerings without marking it, expecting us to curate their mess. Clean it up! Get rid of it, preferably, or at least provide identifiers.]

Lisa adds one more cheer to bring us to a close: Cheers to all the libraries working to manage shrinking buying power and reducing hold limits. That would be every library (no, not that EveryLibrary). The fight against book banning is the story of the year—again, alas, but we have scored many victories this year, including court wins and Freedom to Read legislation (did we send a jeer to New York’s Governor?). The return of ebook legislation must rank second. In a time when Big 5 practices make our collection nearly impossible to sustain, with licenses on popular works expiring even as we see increased digital demand for new ones. The STUPID publisher rejoinder that we just need to fund libraries better—great idea, but will you do it with your corporate $$$ when local governments are often struggling with revenue cuts due to job loss in a difficult economy?— is even more unwelcome in a time when political opposition threatens library funding in many places. To librarians everywhere, let us make 2026 a great year for the Freedom to Read and fair ebook terms. There are Grinches out there—Grinches whose hearts will never grow three sizes. But welcome, new year, bring your cheer. Cheers to librarians far and near. Better days just might be, just long as we have we.