The digital library

Here are BookRiot‘s three highlights from the recent report commissioned by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, entitled An Empirical Study of the Impact of E-Lending on the Book Economy: Increase in digital lending leads to a decrease in book sales. According to the report, “consumer print sales decline by approximately 0.85 to 1.0 percent for every one-percentage-point increase in the share of e-books in public libraries, with adult fiction being at the upper end of this range.” Print books are now less than 25% of library collections. In the 13 years between 2010 and 2013, print went from 86% of materials to 21. In 2023, audiobooks and ebooks made up 31% and 48% of collections. Collection development is a surprisingly small portion of library spending. In 2026, less than 10.7% of library budgets went toward collections. This is down from 2013 . . . when it was a hair over 11%. All of these points are pretty surprising. That print sales should go down…