How Licensing Compromised the Library

Public libraries are besieged on multiple fronts: spiraling costs, budget cuts, book bans, patron privacy risks, inaccessible digital exclusives, embargoed titles, and unstable collections—not the mention a general decline in reading coupled with an upswing in reliance on artificial intelligence. No single development can explain all of the many challenges facing libraries today. But this Article argues that the shift from library-owned print collections to licensed digital ones is an overlooked throughline that has contributed to this constellation of challenges in underappreciated ways. For centuries, the first sale doctrine gave libraries broad autonomy over what they acquired, preserved, and lent.

By insisting that ebooks are merely licensed rather than sold, publishers have escaped those constraints, leaving libraries with collections that are more expensive, more restricted, and more easily edited, deleted, or surveilled by third parties. After surveying the varied harms of the shift towards private control, this Article assesses emerging reforms, including controlled digital lending and state legislative efforts, that may yet restore some of what libraries have lost.