Industry & Advocacy News
September 1, 2026
Updated September 21, 2026
A study by economists at Secretariat Advisors on the rise of digital library lending and its impact on the commercial market for books was released today. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) commissioned the independent study in connection with ongoing state legislative efforts to mandate prices and restrictions on ebook sales to libraries in order to gain insight on the actual impact of increased digital library lending on consumer behavior and the consumer market for books. We at the Authors Guild have felt stuck between those arguing that library lending overall drives sales and others who argue that it replaces sales. Both perspectives make sense, but without access to data, it is impossible to assess what the actual impact is.
The study, titled An Empirical Study of the Impact of Library E-Lending on the Book Economy: As Public Libraries Prioritize eBook Formats, Harm to Commercial Markets Across All Formats is Quantifiable and Significant (download PDF), was undertaken to uncover actual data to help direct conversations on the issue. It found that increased digital library lending does have a substitutive effect on sales in the consumer book market and can have negative ripple effects across the reading ecosystem.
To be clear, the study is not an argument against increased library lending and digital access for books. Authors and publishers naturally want libraries to have as many books in as many formats as possible and for readers to have easy access to books. But before creating policy that gives preference to some formats over others or takes the extraordinary measure of state mandates on licensing terms, it is important to have the facts straight.
Public libraries are among the most important institutions in American life and among the most important participants in the book market. They introduce readers to writers they would never otherwise have found and are enormously important drivers of book discoverability. Yet many libraries today suffer from underfunding, causing states to respond with proposed legislation to curtail prices and mandate license terms. The entire book community—authors, publishers, book sellers, and libraries alike—needs to work together to ensure that libraries have access to a broad array of books and can best serve their communities.
Several states have advanced bills that would cap what publishers may charge libraries for digital licenses, remove limits on the number of simultaneous copies, and impose other instructions on licensing. These bills, if enacted and enforced, would take the precise category of books in the lending ecosystem already prone to substitution—high-demand titles—and mandate more of them for less money, compounding the economic impact of substitution. The Authors Guild has been fighting against these bills, many of which failed on constitutional grounds because they seek to regulate copyright, an exclusively federal domain.
The study makes it abundantly clear that state-level regulation of library lending is not the solution to the goal of expanding digital access and making it easier for libraries to acquire the books their patrons want. Instead, the industry should look to pursue other, healthier solutions that both optimize the value of licensing transactions and distribute the benefits fairly and equitably. Libraries, publishers, and authors must all come together and work towards this goal constructively.
Here are some thoughts:
Public libraries need more and better funding across the country. The Authors Guild has long fought for increased federal, state and municipal library funding, and it behooves us all to ensure that all libraries have sufficient funding, especially in states and localities that have lower income residents—those most in need of free, public sources of books—where we see the most cuts in library funding.
In these days of decreased reading levels among students and competition for young people’s attention, we need to do much more to ensure that all people, especially young people, have access to books in libraries—in safe comfortable spaces—that are open in the afternoons and evenings when people can visit them. In some communities, getting books into young people’s hands may also mean mobile libraries. Let’s invest in more of those. They make a difference.
As many authors can tell you from personal experience, libraries can serve as a refuge for young people, and indeed many of today’s writers trace their careers back to their childhood libraries. All children should have that opportunity.
Rather than charge a flat fee for a period of time—say a year or two—or a number of loans, as has been the case until recently, OverDrive is working with publishers and libraries on a pay-per-read model where a library pays a small fee each time a book is checked out. This makes sense for many reasons: Libraries only pay for the actual loans and so will save money on many titles, and they can offer a greater range of ebooks rather than have to pay an upfront fee of several times the cost of a consumer ebook regardless of how many readers the book will have. Upfront higher fees mean that libraries often must focus on buying only those ebooks that they predict will be most popular.
The industry might also develop more differential pricing among books, which would allow libraries to acquire some books at lower prices and with fewer licensing restrictions—such as general nonfiction and midlist literary fiction, which are suffering from flagging sales and are in greater need of exposure and discoverability in libraries.
Libraries are not only important drivers of discoverability but also preservation. This solution would also help libraries acquire a larger volume of books, including print books, at cheaper prices and grow and add diversity to their collections.
In addition, bestsellers and other popular books at risk of substitution upon release could be “windowed” to preserve commercial value or have higher priced licensing tiers with more restrictions on checkouts. While windowing was resoundingly rejected by libraries in the past, it is worth reconsidering for bestsellers if it helps reduce prices overall to libraries. It is after all an accepted practice in film and television.
The goal should be to enable libraries to buy as many different titles as possible so that library users have access to a broad range of books across genres and subject matter, not just many copies of bestselling books as soon as they are released.
A credit against state tax liability for publishers could serve as an incentive to publishers to lower licensing prices.
Any serious conversation about how much of a library’s dollar reaches a book must cover the role of intermediary services. OverDrive is used by roughly 90 percent of public libraries in North America for digital lending. Other companies that deliver ebooks to library users are Hoopla and Odilo. The role of intermediaries in taking dollars out of the lending ecosystem versus the benefits they provide should be assessed.
Legislators have been asked to regulate the prices publishers charge, but not the terms and prices set by the entities that libraries use to deliver ebooks. Other solutions might include building a public digital infrastructure of library lending, possibly overseen by the Library of Congress or the American Library Association (ALA).
Read the press release and key findings here.
Read the full study here (PDF).
