Big Five Publishers Have Eliminated Perpetual Ebook Access for Libraries, Forcing Repeated Relicensing Every 24 Months

Since 2019, Hachette Book Group and Penguin Random House have eliminated perpetual-access ebook licenses for libraries, replacing them with two-year metered-access models, while Simon & Schuster shifted from one-year to two-year terms. Perpetual access availability in the U.S. dropped from 34% of titles in 2019 to just 15% in 2024, and the average initial cost for licensing a single ebook title rose from $35.54 in 2019 to $47.69 in 2024 -- a 34% increase that outpaces retail ebook price growth by more than 6x per year. Why it matters: libraries must relicense the same titles every two years at inflated prices, so their materials budgets buy fewer new titles each cycle, so patrons face longer hold queues and reduced catalog breadth, so readers in lower-income communities who depend on library access lose equitable access to current literature, so the public library's core mission of providing free and equal access to information is structurally undermined by publisher pricing power. The structural root cause is that the Big Five publishers control over 80% of trade ebook distribution and the first-sale doctrine (which allows libraries to lend physical books without restriction) does not apply to digital content under current U.S. copyright law, giving publishers unilateral power to set license terms, durations, and prices with no legal obligation to offer libraries fair or perpetual access.