"The demand for e-books and audiobooks has surged in recent years according to a 2023 report on the "Digital Public Library Ecosystem" published on the American Library Association's website.

"Those titles should be some of the easiest titles to check out and enjoy, but behind the convenience of downloading a bestseller to your smartphone lies a quiet financial crisis. Major publishing corporations are charging public institutions premium prices for digital content that effectively self-destructs after a few years, draining local taxpayer funds and leaving readers stranded on massive waitlists." [...]

"A coalition of library organizations across the U.S. and Canada including the Association for Rural and Small Libraries, the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, the Public Library Association and the Urban Libraries Council, is now demanding an overhaul from the "Big Five" publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster. The coalition is pushing for mutually-beneficial, sustainable alternatives, such as a "perpetual-use" model where a library buys a digital file once and keeps it permanently."

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