Feature
The rise and rise of ebook prices
The last decade promised a revolution but high prices have stirred up a rebellion. Rebecca Pool asks: what’s the way forward?
In September last year, a group of academic librarians and researchers wrote an open letter asking UK government to urgently investigate ebook pricing and licensing practices in the scholarly publishing industry. During the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, librarians watched as students and researchers struggled to access essential textbooks, due to cost and lack of availability.
Among these was Johanna Anderson,
library advocate and subject librarian from the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Outraged by the situation, she took action and organised the open letter, highlighting excessive ebook pricing, unexpected price rises, copyright law and licence issues. For Anderson, the crux of the current situation lies in ‘gross profiteering’ from publishers, and a misunderstanding of how libraries work. ‘Some publishers trawl through
university reading lists, find the commonly used titles, classify these as e-textbooks rather than ebooks and raise the price,’ she said. ‘At the end of 2019, these books were already more expensive than the hard copies, but they are even more expensive now. ‘These price rises happened with
several publishers at around the same time, without warning or explanation, and
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it was right in the middle of the pandemic,’ she added. Anderson also pointed to the mind- boggling array of pricing models and licences that accompany ebook acquisition, which she describes as random, massively problematic, and a vast drain on her time. ‘And now publishers are trying to get us to buy annual licences for an ebook,’ she adds. ‘We could spend, say £500 a year for this, and then have to buy the book again to stop it from getting withdrawn – we are at the behest of the publisher.’ Anderson is hardly alone in her
frustrations over ebook pricing. Within a weekend of her organising the letter to government, she had attracted some 250 signatures, and at the time of writing, this figure had risen to more than 3,600. Librarians from across the UK are now crowd-sourcing examples of print book
“Within a weekend of her organising the letter to government, she had attracted 250 signatures”
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