Fairfax County leaders say it likely will be up to Congress to give public libraries relief from a complex and costly process of obtaining electronic materials.
In its first joint meeting with the Fairfax County Public Library Board of Trustees in three years, the Board of Supervisors heard from the local library system on Tuesday (Oct. 15) on its efforts to get e-books and other electronic items without breaking the bank.
With customer demand for e-books and audiobooks only intensifying, the challenges are likely to multiply.
Unlike with print editions, which are sold to libraries by publishers, e-books are subject to more byzantine licensing arrangements that can vary in terms and price points.
“Publishers get to choose not only the price, but the model they’ll sell to libraries,” FCPL Technical Operations Division Director Dianne Coan said. “There are many different licensing models.”
According to Coan, in some cases, the licensing cost works out to just pennies for each electronic checkout, but popular items can exceed FCPL’s price range. The publisher of Kristin Hannah’s historical novel “The Nightingale,” for example, charges $10.79 per local checkout, Coan said.
The county supervisors sympathized, but saw no viable solution at the local level.
“It kind of begs for some federal-government fix,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said.
Dranesville District Supervisor Jimmy Bierman suggested Richmond was the wrong avenue, stating that he “wouldn’t bother with the state.” State Sen. Dave Marsden (D-35) introduced a measure in the 2023 General Assembly session that would’ve limited the conditions publishers can impose on libraries in licensing agreements, but the bill didn’t make it out of committee.
While organizations such as the American Library Association and Urban Libraries Council have raised the issue with federal lawmakers, Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn said Congress needs to hear directly from constituents.
“A larger coalition potentially could move the needle,” he said.
However, there could be an equally large coalition lobbying against any rule changes. Maintaining the status quo is a rare case “where publishers and authors are aligned,” Braddock District Supervisor James Walkinshaw noted.
Fairfax County spends about $1.2 million annually in acquiring licenses for digital material, a little over 40% of its total acquisitions budget, Coan told the supervisors. Demand keeps rising: as of Monday (Oct. 14), FCPL had recorded 3 million electronic checkouts, effectively equaling the total for all of 2023.
While that remains well below the 11.2 million print materials loaned out last year, the gap is beginning to narrow at a significant pace, library officials said.
Soon, the issue will be dropped on the plate of Eric Carzon, who will become the county government’s new library director on Nov. 4. He was recruited from a post in Montgomery County to succeed Jessica Hudson, who left for a position on the West Coast.
Even without Carzon at hand, Board of Trustees chair Suzanne Levy said she was pleased to be meeting with supervisors.
“We thought you would be interested in the challenges” the system was facing, she said at the outset of the gathering.
In introductory remarks, McKay noted that FCPL got its start 85 years earlier with an initial appropriation of $250 from the Board of Supervisors in 1939.
“It was important to the board then, it’s important to the board now,” McKay said of library services.
