Can new eBook research and advocacy tools from CILIP and Knowledge Rights 21 kick start the necessary process of change?

ANGER over ebook pricing and licensing models should have peaked during COVID lockdowns when communities were forced online and librarians saw publishers increasing prices and licence restrictions on library ebooks. Campaign group #ebookSOS was born during this period as was Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) a pan-European project working on information regulation.

Their efforts pushed the issue into mainstream media, sector leaders were alerted, even the Competition and Markets Authority looked interested, but the problem hasn’t gone away and no solution has materialised.

Unlocking Ebooks

To address this CILIP was commissioned by Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) to deliver the Unlocking eBooks project. It has two parts, one is its “case for support’ which provides resources to help librarians write letters and provide evidence. The other is its literature review which provides the information underpinning these resources. It has also included a roundtable at the House of Lords and a webinar.

Previously campaigners lobbied politicians directly. This project aims to mobilise professionals on the ground to write to MPs and the Education Committee, and Vice Chancellors and provide their own case studies. Some letters based on a template provided through the project have already resulted in positive responses from decision makers.

Nothing changed

KR21, which is funded by Arcadia, commissioned CILIP to undertake the research. Ben White from KR21 said: “As books have moved from paper to digital – so from sold to rented – the issues for those wishing to access eBooks have exploded – and are continuing to do so. It’s not just high prices. Some publishers refuse to license libraries while titles pop in and out of packages making collection development challenging. The digital rights management (DRMs) used by publishers prevent inter-library loans, and the rights provided researchers in copyright law are often impossible to exercise.”

Caroline Ball cofounder of #ebookSOS and member of the project board for Unlocking Ebooks said: “We are still faced with the same situation – nothing has changed and, in some ways, particularly with the recent Clarivate announcement (see p.8 of Information Professional online) things have worsened. Books and eBooks have always received less attention than journals – we see a lot of outrage about the ‘big deals’ and the exploitation of academic labour, but I’d love to see academics and students directing some of that attention towards books.”

Action

Ben said: “CILIP’s Unlocking eBook report does a great job at highlighting the various issues. We hope colleagues will use the template letters to write with their own examples to their MPs and the House of Commons Education Committee.” (The report includes a portal for providing case studies.)

He added: “It is vital we capture evidence as a pre-cursor to raising the problems universities, school and public libraries face around eBooks” and highlighted two studies due out, one from Glasgow, another from Jagiellonian Universities, both looking at eBooks from a copyright and competition law angle.

Simple and personal

“Part of the challenge is the sheer variety and complexity” Caroline said, “At least with a print book you buy it and then do what you want with it. With ebooks there are endless variables: How many people can access it? How many simultaneously? Does it have artificial scarcity or expiry built in? Is it a one-off or repeating payment? Can we buy it in perpetuity? Can we buy it individually or only as part of a bundle? If it’s part of a bundle...” and this list of variables that a librarian needs to consider doesn’t stop there.

She said this saps librarian time and also makes explaining the problem difficult: “This is an enormously complex subject to explain to non-librarians. Simple, attention-getting messages are key – like our 90-second video – boiling the issues down to the most basic points: prices are outrageous; very little is available digitally; some publishers refuse to ‘sell’ to libraries; and that we can’t buy, we only rent access.”

She added that “tying it to things that affect people personally is important too – the lack of digital ownership affects everyone, none of us own anything we ‘buy’ digitally!”

Health

One sector that affects people personally is health. Neena Shukla Morris, who sits on the project’s advisory board, is liaison librarian at University Hospitals Sussex. In her case study she describes a local decision at the trust where “a key medical reference book, essential for clinical decision-making was priced at £2,750 for a five-year eBook licence. This licence allowed access for a total of just 10 unique users over the entire five-year period, with no renewals and a seven-day loan limit per user.”

So only 10 individuals can access this ebook during the five-year licence. Furthermore they would only be able to loan the book for seven days each over those five years. All together that’s 70 days at a cost of around £40 a day. In contrast this ebook for a private individual would cost £445.96 in perpetuity and a print version costs £429.

Not surprisingly, the case study said: “Unable to justify the restrictive eBook licence, the library purchased the four-volume print set, limiting access to a reference-only basis on-site. This restriction directly impacts medical students’ and clinicians’ access to the latest essential medical knowledge, affecting their ability to make informed clinical decisions and, ultimately, compromising patient care.”

Highlighting this example and other difficulties around ebook licensing to MPs using the project’s template letter is one of Neena’s next aims.

Digital depth

Why does this example matter? Neena said that the clinician who wanted access to the book worked in a department on a different site to the library making it impractical to use the physical book. This clinician also said that when information is not easily available, medics use social media, pointing to a research paper that said UK medical student and doctor Reddit pages have over 40,000 members.

One of the authors of the report, Jonny Guckian, dermatology registrar and Advanced Medical Education Fellow, agreed with Neena’s assessment of the impact on users. He told Information Professional that physical books were rarely used in clinical situations. Weekly ‘difficult cases’ meetings involved phones, laptops, PubMed and Google Scholar – not unsearchable 500-page physical books. Similarly, to revise – he recently took his registrar exams – he bought his own ebooks because they can be tagged and were searchable.

In an (https://tinyurl.com/socialandmedics) article in Future Health Care Jonny points out that social media is gaining influence as a source for many at the expense of conventional knowledge sources, saying there needs to be “meaningful engagement from leadership organisations in our field, particularly from those who have previously seen social media as too risky”. With this in mind, more comprehensive digital access to these conventional knowledge sources within institutions would be valuable.

Close to home

Another aspect of the close-to-homeness of this story is that MPs and Peers have library services that provide them with confidential fact checking services. Like many other libraries they have been affected by changes to eBook licensing made by Clarivate. MPs and peers can ask their librarians any questions about public policy issues – but also about their library’s resources, including eBooks – and will get replies that are confidential to them and without any advocacy.

Let libraries be libraries

“KR21 believes that copyright law and unfair contract law needs to be updated in order to “let libraries be libraries,” Ben White said, “eBooks turn the role of a library all on its head as we rent collections year in year out with little to show for it at the end of the day. The government should recognise that like consumers who cannot negotiate a contract with a large business, libraries face a huge imbalance of power with publishers.

This is because in order to function as a library, they must have access to the books that many publishers offer. Without concerted attention from policy makers on the subject of eBooks, as we see with the reliance by NHS clinicians on Reddit, we risk further undermining access to research – the very basis of our knowledge economy.”