The trajectory of e-book usage in K–12 schools is well-known. Demand was ramping up in the mid- to late 2010s, then took off when Covid lockdowns necessitated a pivot to remote and hybrid learning. After the pandemic, gains continued but at a much lower rate, as educational technologies and publishers’ e-book business models continued to evolve.
Now that federal relief funding through the American Rescue Plan Act has ended and grants from the government’s embattled Institute of Museum and Library Services are far from certain, school library budgets are tighter than ever. And with the recent announcement that Follett Content has partnered with Sora, OverDrive’s student reading app, to deliver digital content to schools, the e-book distribution landscape has become more consolidated. Facing limited funds, higher prices, and fewer vendors to choose from, how are schools procuring digital book access for their students?
“The goal is to have the most access for our kids,” says Amanda Kordeliski, director of libraries and instructional technology for Norman Public Schools in Oklahoma, and president of AASL. Achieving that aim looks different in different states and school districts. Among the basics, school library vendors are vetted at the state level for their privacy compliance, and school librarians want e-books that align with academic standards and easily integrate with their existing digital library and learning management systems and available electronic devices to assure ease of use for educators and students.
In Texas, school boards must now approve library materials proposed for purchase. According to Becky Calzada, district library coordinator for Leander Independent School District (LISD) in central Texas, “A challenge this year has been the implementation of Texas Senate Bill 13, requiring that all new books get approved, so that’s another layer.”
Major distributors of e-books to K–12 school libraries include Sora and Mackin, as well as educational publishers ABDO and Capstone, and larger library database providers EBSCO, Gale, and ProQuest, which also host e-books within their products. Other players include such publishers as Lerner, ReferencePoint Press, and Rosen, and digital reading platforms like Epic, which are primarily consumer focused but also offer educational market products. Many school districts use more than one e-book vendor, and pricing structures and business models among those companies vary. But the librarians we spoke with agree that the post-Covid e-book marketplace has generally become more restrictive and more expensive.
Decisions, decisions
Kordeliski’s district has maintained an OverDrive account for each school level—elementary, middle, and high school—for more than a decade. “It was really easy to grow the collection initially, because we were able to purchase one copy per one user,” she says. “But most everything has moved to a lending model, where you only get access to an e-book title for a year, or for 26 checkouts. That makes it difficult for smaller districts or rural schools to be able to maintain a robust collection, because they have to repurchase everything almost every year. And that’s inaccessible for a good chunk of the schools in the country, because they just don’t have the e-book budget to be able to do that right now.”
Calzada notes that LISD has been using OverDrive as its primary e-book vendor—it also purchases from Mackin and Capstone—for close to 17 years. When it was first considering OverDrive as a portal, that conversation was rooted in devices, she says. “Was it device agnostic? We also had to think about accessibility in terms of internet access. One of the positives for OverDrive is that when a student downloads an e-book on their device, they can take it home and they don’t need additional internet access for it.”
But Calzada realizes that Sora may not be the best fit for everyone, which is worrying for some schools and librarians that had previously relied on Follett Content for e-books. “I have heard a lot of chatter among not just librarians within our institution but beyond, asking, Well, what do I do now?” she says. “There are budget impacts when you shift. When you think about OverDrive, in our case, as an institution, we have roughly 42,000 students across 45 schools feeding into this, and district-level support, too. Whereas if you’re a small, maybe rural library with 500 kids total, the cost impacts are huge.”
In Connecticut’s Colchester Public Schools district, instructional technology coordinator Barbara Johnson recalls her purchase practices from the early days of e-books. “If I were buying, say, the winner of our state’s Nutmeg Award, I would buy a hardcover of that book, three or four paperback copies, and one e-book. That way I could, on a very tight budget, have that book available in many different formats to reach all of my readers.”
But as things shifted after the pandemic, new licensing models became a challenge. “The price of an e-book was sometimes unattainable—just a two-year license for an e-book could be upwards of $75–$100—whereas I could buy a hard copy of a novel for $25 or $30,” Johnson says. “It no longer made sense.”
For the roughly 2,000 students in her district, most recently she has ordered e-books from ABDO, Capstone, Follett, and Mackin. In addition, many teachers in her schools use free teacher classroom accounts offered by reading platform Epic. “We’re buying a little bit here and a little bit there to make a more comprehensive platform, instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket.”
Kristen Luettchau, school library media specialist at Morristown High School in New Jersey, had used Follett as one of her sources for e-books, but when she learned of the Follett-Sora partnership, she began investigating other vendors. “Sora is an option, but the cost is a concern for us,” she says. “Realistically, I don’t think I’m going to be able to use it as our primary vendor, because our district is no longer paying for one of our databases, so that’s going to be an extra $8,000. Between that and the cost of the databases going up usually about 5% each year, it doesn’t leave a lot available for e-books.”
In the meantime, Luettchau has been proactive this school year in finding a mix of strategies to get the most for her e-book budget. “I’m working with the young adult librarian at our local public library to coordinate her e-book purchases and to encourage the students to utilize those free resources as well,” she says. “We worked for several weeks in the fall on getting students to sign up for a library card and understand how to download the Libby app and access the e-books and audiobooks directly from the public library.”
When the public librarian had extra funds in the fall, Luettchau says, “we talked about which titles we might want purchased as audiobooks or e-books to supplement print copies of the book students are getting in school from the English department.” This collaboration, she adds, “has alleviated a lot of the pressure on me to be purchasing the most current e-books.”
For nonfiction, Luettchau has mostly been purchasing titles through ABDO and ReferencePoint. “If you purchase a set amount of the e-book licenses, and I’ve been getting the multi-user e-book licenses, they’ll give you the print copies for free,” she says. “And it’s not a subscription, so we have these e-books forever.”
Another tack for managing e-book costs involves joining forces with other libraries to build strength in numbers and negotiate better pricing. Once such venture is the Connecticut Library Consortium, which “attempts to create a complete marketplace of discount contracts for all of the things that libraries need to buy,” according to Ellen Paul, the organization’s executive director. “We have had a great relationship with Follett, and we’re deeply appreciative that they have been providing our school libraries with a discount on e-books.” She says it remains to be seen whether CLC members will retain that discount now that Follett has partnered with OverDrive. “That’s where our concern comes in. We don’t currently have a discount with OverDrive, and we’ve never been able to have a conversation with them about that.”
Paul acknowledges that library e-book lending has been in the news of late due to libraries’ frustration over costs and contract terms. But she believes that relief is on the horizon, in the form of legislation designed to level the playing field. “Connecticut passed a first-in-the-nation e-book reform law last June, which governs contracts that public, school, and academic libraries enter into with e-book publishers and aggregators,” she says. “We didn’t necessarily want to go down the legislative route, but we were forced to because it’s been 20-plus years of e-book lending, and terms, conditions, and pricing get worse every year. Without good-faith negotiation, I think that legislation is not only appropriate but necessary.”
Librarians are holding out hope for a solution that bridges the gap between e-book access and pricing. The answer lies in figuring out “how we can balance the rights of readers and the rights of authors and publishers too,” Calzada says.
Kordeliski adds, “It’s so important for libraries to have e-book and audiobook access for all of our learners. To have that be uniform and equitable across the country would be my personal dream.”
In a perfect world, Johnson envisions that every school, and every learner, has access to a well-staffed, well-funded library, and that publishers understand that school libraries are in a unique position to reach an unlimited number of readers. “We’re checking out to students and their families, and we are their central location,” she says. “I have transportation delivering these students to my door and taking them home every single day. School libraries have a captive audience and create such a bang for the buck.”
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