Anyone hoping to read the Ottawa Public Library’s most popular e-books of the year may find themselves waiting until well after the holidays, and librarians say major publishers are to blame.
The Women by Kristin Hannah, a bestselling novel in which a young American woman serves as an army nurse in the Vietnam war, is the library’s most popular book of 2024.
But despite offering 75 copies of the e-book, the library’s waitlist currently sits at about 1,200 people. With a maximum borrowing period of 21 days, someone placing a hold on the e-book today could be waiting well over a year before it comes available.
“It’s really a challenge when a book is so popular,” said Sarah Macintyre, division manager of client services with Ottawa Public Library (OPL). “Our clients end up waiting a fair amount of time to get access.”
Queues are similar for other titles on the library’s list of most popular books of 2024.
Louise Penny’s The Grey Wolf, for instance, currently has about 750 holds on 50 copies. The same goes for non-fiction, with nearly 300 people waiting on 26 copies of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.
Although the year’s biggest titles may yield the longest lists, Macintyre said a diverse readership means a wide range of books can generate hundreds of holds.
It’s a phenomenon that’s been around since digital material first entered library catalogues, but a pandemic-driven surge in e-book popularity suggests queues may be longer than ever.
In response, both readers and libraries are adapting — but librarians say the root cause of the backlog remains the same: restrictive e-book publishing practices.
E-book readers, checkouts spike during pandemic
Because e-book distributor Overdrive doesn’t make hold information available, Macintyre said OPL can’t provide specific data on how long readers are waiting for e-books. The data she can access tells a clear story of increasing demand, however.
The number of OPL Overdrive users ballooned in the first year of the pandemic — and has swelled from 50,548 in 2019 to 77,190 in 2023.
In line with users, e-book checkouts went from 887,069 in 2019 to more than 1.1 million the following year.
The high cost of e-books compared to physical copies makes it difficult for libraries to keep up with demand, Macintyre said.
Depending on the title, public libraries may pay two or three times more for an e-book than they pay for its print edition. In some cases, the e-book may be up to six times the price, librarians told CBC.
Calls for cheaper e-books are longstanding.
In 2014, Coun. Tim Tierney led a group of municipalities asking the federal government to investigate the publishing industry for e-book pricing. At the time, OPL was spending about 11 per cent of its materials budget on electronic content.
By 2023, that share had grown to about 40 per cent.
While the library’s spending on e-books is trending upward, the number of copies in its collection has declined slightly since reaching a peak in 2020.
The library is getting less for more — and readers are left waiting longer.
The waitlist would be astronomical, could even be years…– Mary Chevreau, Canadian Urban Libraries Council
“The waitlist would be astronomical, could be even years, depending on how many copies that particular public library can afford to buy,” said Mary Chevreau, executive director of the Canadian Urban Libraries Council.
But reasons for the backlogs have remained more or less consistent, Chevreau said.
Throttled access, embargoed releases
In addition to high prices, Chevreau said the “big five” multinational e-book publishers “throttle” access to e-books by selling them to libraries for either a limited time or a limited number of circulations — sometimes both.
Those publishers — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — will often license copies of e-books for just 12 or 24 months. Once that licence expires, libraries must repurchase access to the same book.
“That throttling is very, very new. It only came about because of e-books,” Chevreau said.
The practice stands in stark contrast to physical books, Chevreau said, which libraries buy once and keep in circulation until the copies are “dog-eared” and “well-loved.”
Publishers will also embargo high-demand releases as a way to hold bestsellers off library shelves for months after they go on sale, Chavreau added.
None of the “big five” publishers responded to a request for comment.
Readers, libraries adapt
E-books are an important offering for libraries, Macintyre said, because the format allows flexibility for readers and includes built-in accessibility features, such as adjustable font sizes and brightness.
But the prohibitive cost of loading up on popular titles is pushing OPL and other libraries to think creatively about how to meet community needs.
OPL offers a reciprocal lending program that allows people with an Ottawa library card to access the digital collections of other libraries in the province. It also has an “express” collection where holds aren’t allowed.
Public libraries are “curating” their collections more than they have in the past by carefully selecting titles for which readers are clamouring, Chevreau said.
For their part, readers may place holds on dozens of books across multiple formats, reading them gradually as they become available. Only a few “hardcore users,” will go so far as to sign up for multiple library cards, Macintyre said.
But any long-term solutions would likely come in the form of legislation, according to Chevreau. Those efforts have so far proved fruitless in Canada.
“We continue to work on it. We continue to hope that at some point we’ll be able to get some clarity and some legislation that would protect our ability to purchase,” Chevreau said.
“In the end, it really is part of our accessibility values — being able to provide good content in the format people want it.”