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Monday, 17 August 2026
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Culture

A Library E-Book Can Expire After 26 Loans. Three Places Banned That, and All Three Bans Are Asleep.

Connecticut, Rhode Island and Washington DC have each outlawed expiring library digital licences. Each law switches on only when enough other places do the same, so none is in force — and meanwhile the queue you are standing in is what decides which titles come back.

6 min 16 sources Confidence 95/100

In short

What happened. Three US jurisdictions — Connecticut in 2025, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia in 2026 — have passed laws banning library digital licences that expire. None of the three is in force. Each switches on only when enough other places pass the same thing.

What it means. Public libraries mostly rent digital books rather than own them. A common licence ends after about 26 loans or two years, and the library buys it again or loses the title.

Risks and impact. Officials in one state priced a print book at about $15 against an e-book licence of $56 to $78 in 2026. Money spent on repurchase is money not spent on new or local writers.

What can be done. Place the hold and tag the title anyway. Many systems buy copies straight from the holds queue, and some publish the ratio they aim for.

What to watch. Illinois. Its bill carries no waiting clause, and its population alone would start Connecticut’s clock.

Shown as a summary because of your reading settings.

What happened

Montana’s statewide digital lending consortium publishes its collection policy, and the 2026 revision says the quiet part in the first paragraph: titles are “licensed for use rather than being owned outright.”

Four models are on offer in the marketplace it buys from. One copy, one user, in perpetuity. A licence metered by time, one or two years. A licence metered by number of checkouts. And a bundle of 100 checkouts several readers can use at once. When a metered licence runs out the title leaves the shelf unless the consortium buys it again. The stated goal is to repurchase when four or more people are waiting, and the policy adds that “due to funding constraints, this goal is often unmet.”

Publishers set those terms. A 2023 report published by the American Library Association records HarperCollins selling libraries 26 circulations per e-book licence, a model it introduced in 2011, with Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster all on two-year terms as of July 2023.

Prices follow the model. Dawn La Valle of the Connecticut State Library told CT News Junkie in May 2026 that a print book costs a library about $15, while an e-book licence runs $56 to $78. Connecticut libraries spend roughly $7 million a year on the category, according to the Connecticut Library Consortium.

What the evidence supports

Three things here are documented rather than argued. The licence models come from a library’s own published policy and from a report the ALA commissioned; nobody disputes them. The statutes exist and say what they say. Rhode Island’s text, added to its commercial law code, forbids contracts that stop a library lending through interlibrary loan, setting its own loan period, or making preservation copies. The Illinois bill carries the same list and no waiting clause at all: “This Act takes effect upon becoming law.”

One thing rests on people rather than paper. The price figures come from librarians and state officials, not from contracts, because the contracts are not public. That is part of the story rather than a gap in it: the Rhode Island and Washington DC texts both ban clauses that stop a library telling other libraries what it agreed to.

And one thing is genuinely unsettled. Every one of these laws counts other places that have “enacted” something similar — and every one of those laws is itself enacted and asleep. Whether a sleeping law counts towards another state’s tally has not been tested, and the officials who must decide publish quarterly reports, not rulings.

How the story is being framed

Libraries are being squeezed. The concrete version comes from Rhode Island, where one novel, The Correspondent, cost the state’s libraries more than $3,400 in licences, most expiring at the end of 2026, with another $2,300 needed to clear a queue of about 1,500 readers. What the framing leaves out is volume. OverDrive reported 820.5 million digital checkouts across its libraries in 2025, up 10.9 percent, of which 379.4 million were e-books. Under the arrangement being complained about, lending keeps setting records.

This is copyright, and a state may not touch it. Maryland tried the direct route in 2021: a publisher selling an e-book to the public had to offer libraries a licence on reasonable terms. In June 2022 a federal judge held that law preempted, “an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress”. The Copyright Alliance says the new bills fail for the same reason. What that leaves out is that the new laws order nobody to sell anything; they restrict what a publicly funded library may sign. Nobody has tested the distinction in court.

Writers do not agree with writers. The Authors Guild welcomed the Maryland ruling in 2022 and argued that the honest fix was more money for libraries, warning that mandates would fall hardest on self-published authors. The Authors Alliance backed the Illinois bill in May 2026 precisely because it regulates terms rather than prices. Both speak for authors, and both mean it.

The background

The waiting clauses are not drafting shyness. They are an attempt to assemble a bloc big enough to matter to a global industry.

Connecticut’s act, signed on 29 May 2025, applies only once one or more other states with a combined population of seven million pass something similar, and the state librarian checks each quarter. Rhode Island’s, which became law without the governor’s signature on 18 June 2026, waits for four other states totalling at least ten million. Washington DC’s waits for ten states totalling more than fifty million, and its library reports to the council quarterly.

Now set those against the 2020 census. Rhode Island has 1,097,379 people. Illinois has 12,812,508 and Massachusetts 7,029,917, and both have bills in progress, so either one alone would start Connecticut’s clock. Nothing starts Rhode Island’s until four states move, and nothing will start Washington DC’s for years. Each law is waiting for laws that are themselves waiting. The Illinois bill passed its House 99 to nil on 17 April 2026 and has sat in the Senate since.

Europe took a different road entirely. In November 2016 the Court of Justice of the European Union held that lending an e-book on a one-copy-one-user basis can fall within the public lending exception in EU law — the same regime as a printed book, with authors paid a fair remuneration set by the state rather than by permission of the rights holder. The court attached limits: the copy must have been lawfully put into circulation, and the exception does not cover copies from unlawful sources.

The deeper story

The most revealing line in the Rhode Island statute is not about money. It forbids any contract that would “preclude, limit, or restrict the library’s right to make non-public preservation copies.”

Somebody had to write that down. It is the point where a rented collection meets the older of the two things a library does, which is not lending but keeping. A metered collection is a flow, not a stock. It fills at the top and drains at the bottom, and the draining is silent. A queue is visible and annoying. An absence is neither.

The publishers’ logic is not absurd, either. A printed book wears out, and the replacement copy was always part of how books paid for themselves. A digital file never wears out, so a 26-loan licence is one way of charging for wear that no longer happens.

But wear is an accident and expiry is a decision, and decisions get made about which titles come back. Montana’s policy is honest about how that goes: repurchase when four or more people are waiting, a goal “often unmet”. The books bought again are the books with a queue. The rest simply do not return, and no notice goes up.

That is the part worth carrying away. A library that owns nothing can still lend magnificently — 820 million times last year. What it gradually stops doing is remembering.

Something to sit with

If your library’s digital shelf quietly emptied of everything nobody happened to be waiting for, how long would it take you to notice?

What should a public collection be allowed to keep for good — and who ought to decide, the people who paid for it or the people who made it?

Sources

We report facts from the sources above in our own words and link to the originals. Interpretation is ours, not theirs.

QUICK UNDERSTANDING CHECK

What did Connecticut's 2025 library e-book law do about its own starting date?

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