Articles

E-books: The Cost [Revised 2025]

by Glenn McEowen

This article discusses the cost of the e-books[1] service. We will look at the vendors' annual fees, the cost of titles, and the time the library team uses to manage e-books.

Vendor Annual Fees:

When we select a vendor for our e-books service, we contract with them to manage the highly technical process that permits e-book files (titles) to be downloaded and read. This includes encryption, assigning return dates, and downloading the files to many different devices. The vendor also provides a free reading app designed for each type of device. The vendor manages holds, handles team training, coordinates title ordering procedures, and negotiates contracts with hundreds of publishers. The vendor will provide a public web catalog made up of titles we have selected and ONLY our titles. (Remember, we want to maintain a TRUSTED collection.)

These are functions that simply cannot be done by a church library. For these services a church library must use a vendor. We will not be able to quote prices in this article because they are subject to change and negotiation. (Please contact the vendor for up-to-date numbers.)

Our church, and all other church libraries I am aware of, uses OverDrive^® as the vendor. Our contract has an annual service fee plus a title budget combined into a single annual payment. Half of the fee covers the services while the other half is used to purchase titles. The annual fees are based on your church membership (not library usage) and are now quite competitive. Small church libraries may even get better terms than larger libraries.

One other option is a consortium[2]. These are difficult to organize, but they do save on the cost. While our church library is in a consortium, OverDrive^® prefers to work with stand-alone libraries.

Cost of E-book Titles:

Your e-book collection, like a traditional library, will grow one title at a time. The titles you can purchase are limited to the publishers that your vendor has contracts with. The vendor’s publisher list will be an important criterion to consider. It will need to include the trusted publishers whose material you would use in your traditional library.

The costs for e-book titles are about the same as paperback versions of the book. A few large publishers charge outrageous fees for their titles. (We skip those, ordinarily.) Heavily illustrated children's e-books will usually cost somewhat more than adult titles. The cost of an audiobook is generally much more than the e-book.

The costs described above are for a simple, “pay-once, use it forever” scheme. Some publishers are, instead, providing titles for a limited time and number of checkouts. The most common limited usage is that a purchased e-book may be used for two years or 26 check outs. Once either limit is reached, the title must be renewed or dropped from the collection.

So why would a library ever want a limited usage e-book? Two reasons: 1) the cost is often somewhat lower than “forever” titles and 2) the “limited” titles tend to be from more popular authors and publishers.  

Cost in Time:

Maintaining an e-book collection will require additional time from the library team. It can involve several hours each week.

Prior to going "live" with your e-book collection, there will be training, policies to be set, and ordering of the first titles to create the initial collection. You will, of course, want to promote the new service. The vendor will work closely with your team through this startup phase. And if any of your team have never read an e-book, now is the time to try!

On your "go-live" date and the few weeks following you will want to have helpful team members to assist your users in loading the apps (Libby^® or Kindle^®) onto their devices and setting logins. Take them through the process of downloading their first e-book.

After “going-live” there will be several tasks that require regular attention:

• Ordering new titles will regularly involve team time. As with buying new print books, you will need just as much research for e-book purchases. Making an order is a several-step process.
• Your vendor can provide MARC records of your e-book purchases in case you wish to merge the e-book titles into your primary collection. It will require editing each record to fit your library's cataloging style. Thankfully, you will not have to cover the books, bar code, to shelve or inventory any of your e-book collection. (We recommend you add the e-books to your primary collection as it permits them to be searched and listed along with your print titles. It does, however, create another task.)
• Statistics about e-book circulation are maintained by the vendor. This valuable information should be reviewed periodically. Since it is separate from your library software, it may be worthwhile to combine the stats in a spreadsheet.
• While it is optional, you can curate your own groupings to appear in the vendor-provided catalog. Groupings might include Christmas e-books, Amish fiction titles, or any kind of grouping you can imagine. The vendor will have default groupings, but you will probably want to add your groupings to theirs. The curation process can be tedious depending on how expansive your groupings are.
• Of course, you will want to promote your e-books. At my church library, we sometimes say, "Did you know that 20% of our library collection is invisible?" Adding e-books to your library ministry is a wonderful opportunity but go into it realizing there will be ongoing costs in time and expense.

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Glenn McEowen serves as a library volunteer at Wedgwood Baptist in Fort Worth, TX. He is the VP of Sales and Development with Library Concepts.

This article is a part of a series on e-books on the Church Librarians Network. 

[1] The term e-books is used to describe both electronic books (including text and illustrations) and audio books. These are typically downloaded (or streamed) to devices such as e-readers, smartphones, tablets and computers.

[2] The term consortium describes an agreement between several libraries that work together to pay the fees and to expand the collection. Each of the libraries share the one collection.

E-Books: The Cost [2025 Revision]