First off, apologies for the dissertation-style title (and the length of this post). While effective in expressing my ire, I didn't think rage-induced, keyboard smashing would be helpful for anyone who comes across this trying to figure out what I'm talking about. Anyway, I wanted to come here and sort of rant but also explain because I feel like if anyone would care about this news, it would be you lovely people.

You may have recently seen news about a study commissioned by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The item in question, “An Empirical Study of the Impact of Library E-Lending on the Book Economy”, is a 72-page report which claims that libraries are undermining the commercial marketplace through eBook licensing agreements, reducing the already dwindling profits for authors and destabilizing the publishing industry. I've linked the study above if you want to read it for yourself. Personally, I don't want to send the report anymore traffic, but I understand that people may want to do their own due diligence, so I've left it up to y'all. However, if you don't mind spoilers, I'm here to tell you the ending: it's all bullshit.

First, the report was conducted by Secretariat Advisors, who present themselves as a "global independent expert services and litigation consulting firm that specializes in expert witness testimony, economic damages, forensic accounting, and dispute resolution." Now, yes, having an independent third-party conduct any such research is an important part of maintaining objectivity. However, given their reported credentials (i.e., economic damages), it seems to me that the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers went into this with a particular mindset - one that I would argue screams "we're experiencing financial losses and we want someone to blame."

Second, for having a team of PhD level economists attached to this report, they sure don't understand how to read data. I want to preface this by saying I am not an economist. I'm also not a statistician. But I did spend nearly 10 years conducting qualitative research in a professional setting, including data modeling and interpretation. And using this knowledge to read the report, I found that it misinterprets data in order back up their claim that “decreases in library e-book prices or certain other changes to licensing terms, as required in recent state legislative initiatives" have harmed the market. For instance, the report compares library eBook collections and print sales, stating that while print sales have stayed steady, library eBook collections have increased. They chart this in the figure below.

As others online have pointed out, the authors don't establish how large the library market is, so there's no way to know if these two metrics are correlated other than "books." The chart also tracks e-book collection size (aka how many copies libraries hold) but not circulation (how many times people are checking them out). Thus a library could potentially grow its digital collection (i.e., buy more digital books) without seeing any increase in use. So even setting aside the missing correlation with print sales, the chart doesn't show borrowing behavior at all. If in stead, they had compared commercial digital book sales with library digital loans, or the relative amount of money spent in each category, they might find a dip if people were choosing to borrowing from library collections rather than purchasing them independently.

Instead, they present a line of reasoning which explores what would have happened if a past event or circumstance had been different: “The key policy question is not whether or not we continued to sell basically the same amount of books while library ebook collections, which make up an unknown amount of the market, increased, but rather how much money we COULD have made if libraries simply had not purchased these titles!” In other words, "Imagine how much more money we could have made if libraries didn't have eBooks! It's all their fault!"

Using this "logic" (I feel like even with the quotes I'm being generous) alongside other shaky claims, the authors then argue against placing government controls on the distribution, purchase, and pricing of e-books and audiobooks in library channels, as these controls would reduce the amount libraries have to pay to license such materials and allow them to increase their collection size with their current (already dismal) budgets. Instead, they suggest the governments should provide more funding to libraries so they can pay current prices (or more as the costs increase with inflation and changing market value).

Third, there is another fundamental flaw with the logic of this report, which is concerning given how many times the authors use the word "expert" on their website: Publishing and books are not a zero-sum market.

What is a zero-sum market, you ask? A zero-sum, or subtractive market, is one in which consuming a good decreases or eliminates demand for related goods; additionally that consumption may remove it from the market. For instance, if you buy a house from one realtor, another realtor loses out. It's a win-lose situation. But books are a non-zero-sum, or additive, market: one person buying or reading a book does not diminish the opportunities for others, nor does a reader's consumption of one book reduce their desire to buy more. We all know this to be true. It doesn't matter how many books we read or buy, we're always going to want more.

All this being said, suggesting that libraries are negatively impacting book sales is not only ridiculous, in my opinion, it's malicious. This report isn't trying to protect authors or editors or any of the folks who play a role in the creation of a book. It's misinformation and lobbying, paid for and designed to oppose potential legislation. Because if publishers were really interested in understanding the impact of the digital library market on retail sales, they would work more closely with libraries and vendors to conduct a meaningful, truly independent study that could positively inform the future for libraries, authors, and publishers. Instead, they've turned libraries into a scapegoat for their corporate greed.