Former President Barack Obama recently released his highly anticipated annual summer reading list. We love a good list, but it got us thinking about what it takes for libraries to offer these books to their patrons. We’ve written about Obama’s books before – The New Yorker reported that 949 copies of his latest memoir cost the New York Public Library $51,962, the equivalent of 3,000 print copies.(!) Play the games on Ebooks for Us to learn more.

In order to get a better idea, Michael Blackwell of St Mary’s County and Ben Gocker and Taylor Beach of Newburgh Public Library provided us some numbers:

The print books cost an average of $16.38 each – $225.84 for all fourteen titles. The library owns those books – it can keep them for as long as they hold together. The average cost of each ebook, when licensed from Overdrive, came to $54.57. And as a reminder, that $54.57 is a license–it gives the library the right to lend the book for two years (or for a number of checkouts, with both number set by the publisher). Leasing all fourteen titles for two runs the library $763.99 – more than three times as much. But, as Blackwell noted, that still doesn’t represent the full library cost.

"If we use Carmi Parker’s 6 year figures for how long print books last (complicated but so far unpublished study, but the only one I’ve seen that quantifies how long libraries keep print books on average before they wear out), and assuming we relicensed all 14 titles three times, cost would be $225.84 vs. $2,291.97.  Ebooks would be 10.15 times more expensive."

Multiply those numbers across a collection and you can see how quickly the costs add up.

Obama didn’t just recommend books – scroll down and you can see his summer music playlist. Want to borrow any of those tunes from your local library? Sorry, but unless your library still carries CDs, you’re probably out of luck. Streaming services like Spotify don’t sell to libraries, and services that do provide digital music to libraries come with their own prohibitive costs and complex licenses and have not been widely adopted.

As one of the authors on Obama’s reading list (and indie press/intellectual freedom advocate!) Hanif Abdurruqib titled his book, There’s Always This Year. But instead, we have to paraphrase Bob Marley, another Obama favorite: “Them [big publisher’s] Belly Full, but We Hungry.”

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