By Ann Ford, VP of Sales and Customer Support, Hoopla
If you work in a library right now, you’ve probably had at least one conversation this month about a new study claiming that library eBook lending is quietly draining retail book sales. If it feels familiar, that’s because it is. We were having a version of this same conversation back in June, over a different Authors Guild study. I’m breaking down the numbers behind this latest one in this week’s episode of Continuing the Conversation, and I’d encourage you to watch it if you want the full accounting.
This post isn’t that breakdown. It’s the bigger argument underneath it. It’s the argument I think actually matters once the headlines fade and the next study inevitably shows up.
The Wrong Question
Every one of these studies is built around the same question: is library lending taking money away from publishers and authors? It’s the wrong question, and I think we should stop letting it set the terms of the conversation.
Here’s the right question: who controls the terms libraries lend under, and are those terms fair to everyone at the table—authors, publishers, libraries, and readers?
Because that’s where the real imbalance sits. Publishers set digital licensing terms unilaterally. Libraries don’t get a seat at that negotiation the way they historically did with print. A study measuring whether a library eBook substitutes for a retail sale never has to touch the question of term and fair pricing at all.
Fair Compensation Was Never the Disagreement
Nobody in this industry, least of all libraries, disputes that authors and publishers deserve to be paid fairly for their work. That’s not where the disagreement lives, but framing it in this way is a big part of what makes these studies land as persuasive to people outside the industry. The actual disagreement is about how compensation gets structured, and whether that structure adapts to how people actually read now.
Print worked on a simple model: one purchase, one copy, indefinite use. Digital never worked that way, and pretending it should is where a lot of this tension comes from. Libraries are being asked to fund a format that behaves nothing like the one it’s replacing, under licensing terms they don’t set, while absorbing all the political risk when someone decides to publish a study about it.
The Model That Resolves This
This is the part that gets lost when the conversation stays fixated on substitution statistics: the fix isn’t picking one licensing model and calling it the answer. It’s making sure the model can flex to match how a title behaves.
Pay per use is the clearest version of the idea. A library isn’t pre-buying speculative demand and hoping it pays off. It pays when a patron actually borrows a title, and the author and publisher get paid for that use every time. For the vast majority of a library’s collection of backlist, midlist, and even most new releases that never spike, that’s about as close to a fair, frictionless match between use and payment as this industry has built.
But this model is not unbreakable: hand a true breakout bestseller a pure pay per use meter with no ceiling, and thousands of simultaneous borrows can turn into a bill no budget saw coming. That’s exactly why Hoopla wasn’t built as a single licensing model. Flex and Instant Bundles exist specifically to give a library fixed, predictable costs for the high-demand titles where a pure per-use meter stops making sense, while pay per use keeps doing its job everywhere else.
That’s the actual structural answer: a licensing model with enough range to match a fixed-cost bestseller with the same rigor it brings to a pay per use backlist title, so a library never has to choose between a broad collection and a predictable bill. And creators get paid fairly, regardless of which lane a given title falls into.
If more of this industry’s energy went into building and adopting licensing models with that kind of range instead of commissioning studies to relitigate whether libraries should exist in their current form, we’d be having a much shorter, much less repetitive conversation.
Where This Gets Decided
This isn’t just an academic disagreement anymore. It’s playing out in state legislatures right now, with several states actively moving on library e-lending legislation this year. Whatever you think of any individual bill, the underlying question those bills are trying to answer is the right one: should the terms of digital licensing be something libraries can negotiate, or something imposed on them. That’s the conversation worth having. A study measuring substitution effects isn’t it.
Watch the Full Breakdown
If you want the detailed, source-by-source look at where this particular study’s numbers hold up and where they don’t, that’s what this week’s Continuing the Conversation episode is about. This post is the argument I keep coming back to underneath all of it: access for readers and fair pay for creators were never actually in conflict. The fight is over who gets to set the terms. And that’s worth being honest about every time one of these studies shows up.
Dig Deeper
Want more context? Revisit our earlier conversation about the study, read the full report, and explore additional reporting and perspectives from across the industry.
Previous Continuing the Conversation Webcast
Continuing the Conversation with Ann Ford – The Authors Guild Study Explained
The Full Study
An Empirical Study of the Impact of Library E-Lending on the Book Economy — Secretariat Advisors, commissioned by the Association of American Publishers and Authors Guild
Association of American Publishers
New Study Analyzes the Impact of Library E-Lending on Commercial Book Markets
Words & Money — Andrew Albanese
Publishing Industry “Study” Says Digital Library Lending Is Cannibalizing Retail Sales—Librarians Say It Reveals Something Else
Ron Charles
Libraries Are Not the Problem
ReadersFirst
Significant Flaw in New Library eBook Study
Publishers Weekly
In Final Order, Court Declares Maryland’s Library E-book Law Unconstitutional
Words & Money
Rhode Island Passes Its Library Ebook Bill
PEN America
Report: Public Libraries Face “Existential Threat”
