Oregon libraries see growing demand for digital books

Libraries worldwide broke digital lending records last year as Overdrive, the company that operates Libby and Sora, recently reported seeing more than 739 million borrows of audiobooks, e-books and digital magazines — a 17% increase from 2023. But while many library card holders may be enjoying the latest bestseller at no cost, the bill public libraries pay to provide this service grows just as much as demand.

Public libraries do not purchase digital books, but rather the license to distribute them. That licensing needs to be renewed regularly, making audio books and e-books up to four times more expensive than a physical copy. Some states, including Washington, have asked lawmakers to step in to try to make digital more affordable. Currently Oregon has no bill or law around digital books, but libraries across the state report seeing growing demand. Stephanie Chase is the executive director of the Libraries of Eastern Oregon and governing board member of the Oregon Digital Library Consortium. Le Button is the collection development librarian at Deschutes Public Library. They both join us to share what demand has been like for digital books in recent years and how libraries balance buying physical copies versus digital ones.

The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Libraries worldwide broke digital lending records last year, with 740 million borrows of audiobooks, e-books and digital magazines – that was a 17% increase from the year before. But while many library users are enjoying the latest bestsellers at no cost, public libraries are paying more and more to keep up with demand. Some states, including Washington, have asked lawmakers to step in to try to make digital library offerings more affordable. There is no such effort in Oregon, but libraries across the state are reporting a big uptick in digital borrowing.

Stephanie Chase is the executive director of the Libraries of Eastern Oregon and a governing board member of the Oregon Digital Library Consortium. Le Button is the collection development librarian at Deschutes Public Library. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.

Stephanie Chase: Thank you so much.

Le Button: Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Miller: Le, first – what has demand for e-books and audiobooks looked like in recent years in Deschutes County?

Button: It’s definitely been growing up steadily over the last couple of years. We saw a really big uptick during COVID. I think we weren’t able to offer physical materials in the same way, so a lot of people who maybe hadn’t tried out e-books before or downloadable audiobooks gave them a shot for the first time. And we’re really continuing to see growth ever since then.

Miller: So it’s one of those societal accelerations, tied to the pandemic in some ways, that continued after the pandemic?

Button: Absolutely, yeah.

Miller: Stephanie, in Eastern Oregon, how much growth have you seen in digital borrowing?

Chase: I think similar … We have seen a year on year double digit increase. I’m sure this is familiar to Le, 10%-20% year on year. The libraries of Eastern Oregon, we support all of the public libraries east of the Cascades, except for Deschutes. So between us, you have a nice picture. For our patrons, that’s been pretty steady, and that’s been consistent before and after the pandemic. I think we had a little bit of a difference with a lot of our public libraries east of the Cascades in that they were open and people were able to access physical materials much earlier in the pandemic than a lot of other areas in the state. But that also did not stop people from continuing to check out digital materials as well.

Miller: Stephanie, what do you think is behind this increase? And as you noted, it predates the pandemic.

Chase: It does. I went to look back when the program started here in Oregon. It’s been going for quite some time, so I just went back and looked about 10 years. So 10 years ago, we checked out about 81,000 items over the course of the year for all of those counties east of the Cascades, except Deschutes. And this year, we’re on pace to check out over 300,000 items just in that area. So it’s a 275% increase in 10 years.

I think some of that really comes from convenience. It’s really easy. And the main purveyor of the service, OverDrive, through their app Libby – which is the same thing – has made it a lot easier for people to check out these digital materials. It used be much more difficult to get them on your device or on your e-reader. So some of this I think is just about ease of access. You can look it up at midnight and download it on your phone or place your hold, listen to it then on your walk or when you’re in your car, or read it while you’re waiting in line. So I think convenience is a huge factor.

And it mirrors a lot of what we see in other areas in terms of people wanting to access things digitally, through music, through streaming, through movies. It’s just behavior that we see with our patrons in other areas too.

Miller: Le, do you find that there is particular interest in e-books for certain genres?

Button: I would say that interest in e-books really kind of mirrors what’s popular in terms of print materials, so I wouldn’t say that there’s one genre that particularly e-book consumers are drawn towards. We have to be very selective with the e-book titles that we purchase, so we tend to focus on those really kind of like popular heavy hitter titles in e-book formats; whereas with print, we can branch out a little bit more.

Miller: That gets to the money questions, which I think we should turn to now. How does it work financially for a library to make it possible for their patrons to download, let’s say an e-book?

Button: For the typical end user of an e-book, imagine you’re just like a person buying an e-book for yourself, it’s very similar to the purchase of buying a print book. You go to the platform, you purchase it.

For libraries, it’s very different. We don’t purchase the book itself, we actually purchase a license which allows access to that title. And that license is usually limited, either in terms of time or number of checkouts. Many are a 12 month license, so after 12 months the license expires, we lose access to it, or maybe 12 or 24 checkouts.

In addition to the fact that these licenses expire, they’re also significantly more expensive. On average, we’re paying somewhere between three times as much and five times as much for a license of an e-book or downloadable audiobook as we would be paying for that same title in print. So there’s a pretty substantial differential in terms of cost.

Miller: Stephanie, how do you explain that? This is a digital file that is temporary, either in time or in the number of patrons who can access it. Why does it cost three to five times as much as a physical book?

Chase: Dave, I think you’re hitting on this question that is a challenge for all of us who are really seeking to provide these collections to our patrons. Back in the early 2010s, the big five publishers, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, were part of this antitrust collusion suit with Apple that kind of accused them of price fixing. Since that point, even as each of these publishers may recognize the need to do something different, or we in libraries are kind of driving the conversation to have things handled differently, it’s very hard for change to happen because each of those publishers is really responding to this in their own way.

So it has just created this ecosystem for us on the purchasing side that is very complex. As Le pointed out, how many times it can go out, how long it lasts, what kind of access you have, what the price is, that will vary from publisher to publisher, imprint to imprint, e-book to audiobook. So it’s very, very challenging to find a way to really spread the money around as the demand for these resources are going up by double digits.

Miller: I want to go back to something Le said earlier. Let’s say Multnomah County Library, my local library, buys a book or licenses an audiobook for 12 or 24 checkouts, and I download that or I get that on my Libby app, and I don’t listen to it – I just don’t get to it because there are other things that are going into my ears – has my downloading that, checking it out, counted against Multnomah County Library’s total for that? Are they paying for something I didn’t even listen to?

Button: They are, yes.

Miller: Wow, OK. This is a new thing to be guilty for … so thanks for that. [Laughter]

How common is it that libraries would opt for that version of the license, the limited number of checkouts as opposed to the limited time frame?

Button: So we’re often not given a choice. As Stephanie mentioned, these are really terms being set by the publishers and by the platform. So we really have to go with whatever options are being offered.

Miller: Stephanie, I mentioned that you are a part of the Oregon Digital Library Consortium, secretary of this group. What does this consortium do?

Chase: Back when the ability to access digital materials was really getting going, many states, Oregon included, did this through a consortium model, where the libraries got together and created a pool of funds and a single access point for patrons to access these digital materials remotely. A lot of that was around the pricing, and the opportunity especially for small and rural libraries to be able to afford to offer this service.

In Oregon, as it has gotten more popular, different libraries have left the state consortium to have their own platform. So Deschutes is one example. Multnomah is another, the libraries that are in the Washington County Cooperative Library District. But pretty much anybody else, if you’re using any other public library in Oregon, then your library is sending funds to the Oregon Digital Library Consortium to buy materials at a state level to, again, really help spread that access and the burden of the cost more broadly across the state.

I just also want to say, please don’t feel guilty about checking things out. Because the best thing that you can do is use your library. I’m sure Le would say this, too – there are a lot of tricks to managing your holds that your local public library staff person would be happy to help you. If you’re a user of Libby, then definitely use the suspend hold feature. If you don’t think you can read it when it becomes available to you, you can suspend your hold. And when it comes back up, then you can check it out if you have time. But really using your library, showing that activity, showing that you believe and want to use the services your library provides are so important to us.

Miller: Le, has the big increase in digital borrowing that we were talking about before been tied to a decrease in physical book borrowing?

Button: I wouldn’t say so. Our physical collections are still very much used. And in fact, only about a third of our active cardholders have used our digital resources in the past year. We know that most folks are actually not accessing this, even though there is a large amount of use. I think it’s more a case of a smaller percentage using it a lot, as opposed to maybe the typical library customer maybe checking out one print book a year. I think we have more power users among the e-content users.

Miller: It’s very light, you don’t have to carry hundreds of pounds of books if they’re all digital.

Stephanie, I’m curious about demographics here. Do you have data about the age groups of patrons who are more or less likely to go for digital offerings?

Chase: The information that libraries collect about their patrons, that’s really an individual library decision. Most libraries aren’t collecting a lot of information about age or about gender unless they’re collecting a birth date for some reason, and then that’s not rolled up to us here at the state level. What I would say is when you look consistently across libraries or across the sphere of people who are doing digital borrowing – and Le you probably can add in here too – that you tend to see use across age ranges. You do tend to see the use of digital materials with older patrons, I would say patrons kind of in their 40s and up. Younger patrons are really tending to be heavier users of physical materials, print books, although certainly we’ve seen this huge uptick in the use of digital audiobooks. So now, at least for the state consortium, more digital audiobooks are checked out than e-books. And that audio behavior tends to be across age ranges.

But it’s really hard to say that there’s kind of one group who’s using this more than another. Although again, a lot of that data is kind of rolled up and anonymized across libraries because not all libraries are collecting that information.

Miller: Le, what do you see in terms of who’s using what, to the extent that you have access to that kind of information?

Button: I do want to emphasize that customer privacy is super important to us, so we’re not tracking people’s ages or whatever.

But anecdotally, I can say the folks that I help access e-content are usually on the older side. One advantage that both e-books and downloadable audio books offer is there’s an accessibility component. With e-books, you can increase the font size. So maybe you’re a large print reader but not all the titles you want to read are released in large print. You can magnify the font size in your device and access a lot more books that way.

And downloadable audio books, obviously, there’s not the visual component. So, definitely older folks, folks with visual impairments are making a lot of use of these collections.

Miller: Stephanie, did I hear you right that at this point, in terms of digital downloads, more audiobooks are being borrowed than e-books?

Chase: That’s certainly true for us in LEO and that’s true for the Oregon Digital Library Consortium as a whole. Sometime [at] the end of 2023 and then throughout 2024, we really saw that switch. And the state Digital Library Consortium has also changed their ratios now … so, how quickly they kind of get a flag to buy new copies to really prioritize audiobook use over e-book use.

Miller: Le, to go back to the big picture here, given what you said earlier, that digital licensing is three to five times as much as a physical copy of a book, and let’s assume that library budgets are not gonna have a huge increase in the coming years, does this mean that if you want to give your patrons what they want, you have no choice but to just buy fewer books?

Button: We really are trying to find the right balance. There’s a lot of decision making that has to happen. Obviously, we do not have unlimited money and don’t expect to get a lot more in the future, so sometimes it is a matter of deciding what the best use of money is. But I think that it is really about finding that balance between physical and digital.

Miller: Stephanie, how do you think about that balance right now?

Chase: I think what Le said is really spot on. And I think some of what we can work on and why this might be a helpful message to all the library users who are listening, is to really give grace and patience to your library. They’re really trying their best. It’s impossible for almost any library in the country to meet the demand they have for their super users for the most popular titles. So as a user, when you go to check that out in digital, I would expect a long wait for that. And that is true almost no matter where you are. It’s really an opportunity to explore the other content in the collection while you’re waiting, and it might be a long time, months for that digital item. You can find really interesting other items to check out in the meantime. But that piece of just knowing that you’re probably gonna have to wait, and you’re waiting because we’re doing our best to do all of that balancing that Le talked about, that is really helpful for the person that you see when you come and ask for help in your library.

Miller: Le, as I mentioned at the beginning, Washington lawmakers are talking about ways to make digital offerings more sustainable for libraries. In recent years, legislation like that or laws like that have received a lot of pushback or legal challenges around the country. What would you like to see in Oregon?

Button: I would love to see a situation where libraries were treated more like the typical end user. I think that if we could pay prices that were closer to what the typical user is paying, that just feels fair to me. And I don’t think it would decrease the amount of money we were spending, I think we would happily spend more if we got more value from what we’re spending. So I would love to see things more in alignment with how the typical e-book or audiobook customer is treated.

Miller: And Stephanie, how do you think about this question of maximizing your ability as libraries to offer books and audiobooks to people who want them, while also making it possible for publishers to stay in business?

Chase: I think this is really the issue. I was thinking about this earlier … one of the benefits I think we see in this digital content space here around e-books and audiobooks are in part because publishers took this really physical item based perspective. It’s allowed them to continue to play a very strong role in having a robust and varied publishing environment. And that’s certainly different, I think, than probably any of us would say is true in cable or music. So having a robust publishing ecosystem is so important to making sure that we have great books coming out that really appeal to a wide variety of readers and celebrate a lot of voices.

So first and foremost, I want to make sure that ecosystem is maintained and continues to grow. I think it is unfortunate that it is happening on the backs of libraries who don’t have a ton of money to be players in this space. And somehow, we need to get back to being able to have the conversations about what that future could really look like.

Miller: Stephanie, you said talk to your librarian to get tips for how best to use the system to its fullest. What other advice would you give us?

Chase: I would really encourage you to think beyond the titles that you’re seeing published very widely. There’s an incredible amount of books and audiobooks that are released every year that don’t get the same publicity as those books that you’re gonna wait a really long time on hold for. Whether you do some research yourself online, or come and ask your local library staff for some suggestions, you’ll be able to find some amazing things to listen to or read that you’re not going to have to wait very long for. And most library staff love having those conversations with you about what you could read or listen to next.

Miller: Stephanie and Le, thanks very much.

Chase / Button: Thank you.

Miller: Stephanie Chase is the secretary of the Oregon Digital Library Consortium and the executive director of the Libraries of Eastern Oregon. Le Button is the collection development librarian at Deschutes Public Library.

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