Librarians fighting 'exorbitant' e-book pricing hope for CMA action

Librarians fighting the “exorbitant” pricing and licensing of academic e-books claim others are afraid of speaking out about the subject and are hoping the Competitions & Marketing Authority (CMA) will take action.

Johanna Anderson, a subject librarian at the University of Gloucestershire who helped to start the campaign #ebookSOS, talked about the problems she and colleagues faced as part of a breakout session at the Independent Publishers Guild Spring Conference.

Anderson launched her campaign last year after the coronavirus crisis brought the issue to a head, with more students having to access material online as they were unable to access libraries physically.

She said, although a lot of publishers initially released a lot of their electronic content for free, this was “quickly withdrawn in June".

Books that were available in e-book form often became “ridiculously expensive or only available in bundles or third-party platforms", she said. Some licences also only lasted for one year.

She cited cases where a physical book cost £60 compared to £480 for a single-user e-book, or £600 for a three-user e-book.“We can't afford these prices, so I could not provide books for my students,” she said.

When she complained to publishers, she said she was told she didn’t understand how e-books worked. “The power balance is so skewed that we couldn't do anything about it ourselves,” Anderson complained.

Anderson claimed that she and other librarians had received what she termed "threatening" phone calls from unidentified publishers to their bosses, saying they shouldn't complain publicly about prices. She said: "A lot of librarians were cowed back and were scared of speaking out. A lot of this research is paid by public funding. They are our academics writing the content and yet we cannot afford to buy these books for our students."

She helped write an open letter to the Education Select Committee to ask them to investigate the problem, signed by librarians, researchers, lecturers and students, but was told that they did not have the capacity to undertake a review.

However, she told IPG delegates that the group has since petitioned the Competitions & Marketing Authority (CMA), which is now considering the issue and is aware of a lot of the publicity associated with the complaint.

Information scientist Charles Oppenheim said, if the CMA chooses to pursue this, there are powers under the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act for them to recommend to the secretary of state to override any unreasonable licensing imposed by a copyright holder, however he was not aware that these had ever been used in the past. “Librarians have a weapon in their hands,” he said.

In the Q&A session which followed, Anderson was challenged by freelance Matt De Bono, who usually works for Kogan Page, about “misunderstandings on both sides", particularly around what he said was “miscommunication” about one-user concurrency on e-books. He said that three concurrent user access is often sufficient for a course of 100 students.

Anderson hit back, saying it becomes a problem when lots of students are trying to access the same book at the same time for an assignment, and that many books are relevant to lots of different courses. She said she had “no objection” to licences “that are a reasonable price”.

She concluded by saying she was hoping to compile a list of publishers according to their ethics and accessibility which could then be directed to librarians and academics when they are drawing up reading lists.

“We are hoping that people will want to be on it, and so the smaller presses and the more ethical presses will get more notice,” she said. “The big boys monopolise everything, so it's kind of getting around that.”