Elending and Untapped Projects - ARC Partner Summary

In 2020 an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research project was launched, looking into the ecosystem of eBooks, eLending and copyright in Australia. ALIA was among several industry partners on the project.  

Their final industry partner report condenses the methodology, findings and discoveries of the extensive research project. These include:

• An inflexible and unresponsive market: where our librarians told us they wanted different terms so as to make best use of their budgets and meet reader needs, in fact 97% of titles were available under only one kind of licence.
• Patchy availability: Australia and New Zealand were missing 21% of titles; Canada and the US were missing 12%. When we looked at a subset of titles of most interest to Australians, we found 24% of the 546 titles tested were not available for elending (only 6% were not available as physical books).
• Little evidence of a ‘market’: the terms offered for titles have nearly nothing to do with the characteristics of the individual titles (such as their age, or popularity) — what seems to determine the price is the identity of the publisher.
• Licence terms interfere with libraries’ role in offering variety: increasingly, ebooks are available only on metered and time-limited licences: licences which expire after a certain number of terms or a certain period — whichever expires first. To justify the expenditure, libraries must be confident that there is sufficient demand for the book within the duration of the licence. This makes it more likely libraries will focus on new, popular titles at the expense of older titles. In our survey, librarians expressed interest in per loan or simultaneous use licences (like those available in some European countries), but we found no evidence of these being offered in Australia.
• A positive impact when books enter the public domain: public domain titles were more available for elending, and at a lower price, refuting claims sometimes made that publishers will not invest in making public domain titles available.
• In one key positive message, no evidence of embargos on new titles: new titles were made available for elending at the same time as titles launching for sale.