With the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic lingering, Penguin Random House announced this week that it has once again extended its Temporary Library Terms of Sale for digital content as well as its temporary story time permissions, both of which will now run through June 30, 2022.
Under the terms of its programs, PRH will continue to offer libraries (through participating wholesalers) the option to license e-books and digital audio for one-year terms at a 50% prorated price as an alternative to the standard two-year term (for e-books) or perpetual access (for digital audio). A cost-per-circulation model is also available.
For read-aloud videos, PRH will continue its open license offering, which asks only that educators, librarians, booksellers and other readers seeking to post readings from Penguin Random House books to complete an online information form.
All PRH titles are eligible for the programs (frontlist and backlist, adult and children’s fiction and nonfiction titles, as well as titles published by DK and Penguin Random House Publisher Services client publishers).
The temporary programs first went into effect in March of 2020, in the very early days of the Covid-19 crisis, and will have been in force for over two years by the time they expire if they are not extended further.
Librarians continue to tell PW that the temporary pro-rated terms offer them much-needed flexibility in managing their digital budgets. Though schools and libraries have long reopened their physical collections, librarians say the demand for digital resources has leveled up and they expect that demand will remain significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels.
