What's the Biggest Threat to Library Ebooks?

Maria Bustillos, whose work we at ReadersFirst have often celebrated, recently published an article in Columbia Journalism Review on “The Bigger Threat to Books Than Bans.” The piece is well-worth a read. Its point is that despite many bans on books at local and state levels, the attempt to take over the Library of Congress, efforts to censor books in military schools/universities, )and now the reduction of the IMLS to a front for puerile propagandistic “Freedom Trucks” unworthy the name “library collection,”) a still greater threat to reading exists: “The biggest threat to books may in fact be the least known: the oligopoly of intermediaries controlling their distribution.”

Ms. Bustillos states “US libraries, universities, and bookstores rely for the delivery of books on a small number of very big profit-driven companies, many of them privately held, whose commitment to freedom of expression is at best uncertain. Each of these companies represents a potential chokepoint for books and periodicals. They all exercise near-monopolistic control over a piece of the distribution chain, with the capacity to render whole catalogues of e-books inaccessible to library patrons, or to university students, or online book buyers, at the flick of a switch.”

“In the case of e-books,” she adds, “where these near monopolies have consolidated and solidified over the past decade, the danger of a sudden loss of access is particularly acute.”

She offers a solution—one which we at RF support: “What if writers could sell (really sell, not license) their e-books and newsletters straight to the library? This is the model that Brick House, the writers’ cooperative I belong to, is working to create. We’ve asked hundreds of small publishers to join us in developing a safe passage, free of intermediaries, between authors, publishers, libraries, and readers. Lots of publishers and authors have signed on. And many more would love to—but they can’t, because they’re bound by contracts with those intermediaries that demand exclusive rights for distributing their books. Publishers caught in that trap can only provide libraries with e-books to license temporarily—books for rent, books that can expire, books that can be shut off.”

Bustillos is correct in much of her argument. If the current administration were to pressure an Amazon or a KKR not to carry a certain book, who would bet on that book (or a whole class of books) staying available? The removal of certain content from the books, as has happened with so many government web pages since January, is more likely than total removal—but the point still stands. We can (and should) celebrate that a judge has thrown out an individual suit against a major newspaper and big publisher, and thank Penguin Random House and other publishers for fighting books bans, but they have not yet been subjected to the very instruments of government using federal threats—and power—to censor. Censorship of the sort she imagines is all too real a threat, with big distributors knuckling under to preserve the bottom line. A boycott like that which forced the reversal of the recent decision to fire a late night talk show host would, alas, be unlikely to materialize over a library ebook.

Her point that this threat is bigger than banning efforts, however, may not be completely correct. The biggest threat comes from a political movement, including a decades-long effort to pack the courts to undermine democratic norms—an effort that goes hand-in-hand with book banning and finds expression in Project 2025, where librarians are in effect criminalized on Page 5. It is exemplified recently in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that library collections are “government” speech, not protected buy the First Amendment, and subject to gutting by local elected officials. The force behind the bans and potential shutting off of content via ebook distributors is the biggest threat to library content of all kinds, to library funding, and to the enlightened values girding libraries. Let’s by all means hold distributors accountable to library standards for safeguarding content. Let’s seek better terms for library ebooks, including purchase. Let’s promote the small publisher ecosystem and authors and find effective ways to distribute and discover content outside of KKR. But let’s not take our eyes off the biggest threat of all.