Introduction
In my previous post I described some of the dangers of e-lending growth in the public library. I used the simile of a parasite. For variety’s sake I’ll change the image to that of the hunter and the lion in the Greek tragedy “Agamemnon” by Aeschylos from 458 BC. In a famous passage the choir is using a parable to describe the havoc created by (it is generally agreed) Helen of Troy. The parable is of a hunter finding a lion cub and bringing it home with him. At first everyone loves the little bundle of cuteness but it grows and eventually shows its true nature by going on a killing spree. The man’s sheep and his family end up massacred by this “priest of destruction.”

There seems to be two ways of living with a lion. Either make it stay a cub or change the environment to accommodate a full-grown lion. The simile is getting a bit stretched here I admit. The principle at work should be clear enough though. Either control e-lending early in its development or let it grow while it changes the library whether you want it to or not. Digital content delivery free at the point of use WILL grow if not reigned in. As with lions; control them or they will devour you, your family and your sheep too.

Of these two strategies the latter is by far the more interesting, but also existentially much more challenging. It will be dealt with in part II. And then there’s the third way which can’t be recommended, but which I have seen in practice in more places than I had hoped; just don’t think too much about it. E-lending is making up for the steady loss of physical lending. What’s not to love?

The tools
Keeping e-lending down and manageable involves well-known tools such as loan limits, collection restraints and user restraints – i.e. who can become a user – and various artificial obstructions to use of the service. Of these, loan limits of various types are the most prolific. The tools come in the form of:

A limit on loans

• In my experience this is almost universally used, but some municipalities in Denmark allow for limitless loans. Some regions and countries with very small collections also allow for near unlimited use.
• Some limit varieties come with the ability to return loans freeing up a slot. Some don’t and the book is yours for the fixed loan period of typically a month mimicking the standard physical loan period most places. See also below. This confuses users who will helpfully suggest the ability to turn in loans. They are ebooks after all so why not?

A limit on spending

• With metered access or one-copy-multiple-users being the norm most places the library knows its costs by buying licenses, but of course when the loans are gone there are just empty digital shelves until the next acquisition round.
• In other systems with one-copy-multiple-users or various pay-as-you-go solutions, libraries will typically set a limit on the monthly cost and/or the cost that any individual user can incur for the library. In this system, libraries may run out during the month and then open for business again on the first of next month. A bit similar to the empty digital shelves above but more predictable.

Collection restraints

• These are put in place by the library or publishers or both. This is where most of the international strife between libraries and publishers resides; what titles are offered to the libraries, at what cost and with what terms and conditions for use. Macmillan’s infamous “one license per library” policy is a case in point. When say New York Public Library can buy one license for a bestseller, use of the service will be limited to say the least.
• Libraries may restrict themselves to only buying some kinds of e-titles according to a collection development policy. In Denmark, we focus on the back catalogue, Danish literature, narrow titles and children’s literature. In Ireland, they treat the digital service more like the physical library and focus acquisition on new and popular titles. Logically, smaller, restricted collections have a correspondingly lower use rate than bigger, general ones.
• A tight collection development policy for smaller language countries or regions – the Estonias and Flanders and Norways of this world and hundreds of others – might kill two birds with one stone by really focusing on the national or regional literature. One bird being controlling the collection and thereby the number of loans, the other having a clear raison d’être and a cultural policy standpoint.
• Digital collections may shrink relatively speaking by being deprived access to many kinds of digital literature. Streaming services are making “originals,” that we are not offered and literature moves to new forms such as podcasts which is not our strength.

Quality of the service

• You wouldn’t think somebody would make a worse service than necessary to limit use, but that logic is in fact out there. A publisher once told me she was only comfortable with eReolen (the national e-lending service in Denmark), because it wasn’t as great as the commercial services; the technology, the features etc. She went on to explain: “I like the digital library to be the same as the physical one. Yes, you can get books for free, but you often have to stand in line and the books are a bit yucky and pee-y(!?)”
• To my knowledge, no library in the world has an e-lending service that matches commercial services in terms of functionality and yumminess of design, but in Denmark we have deliberately flown under the radar with frontends that emphasized the literature part and not the lending part. We’re making a virtue out of necessity, because we cannot match the development budgets of commercial services even if we wanted to and we want to be different anyway.

Obstructions

• This category is underdeveloped and there’s certainly room for creativity. A fixed loan period is an obstruction that few users really understand but serves as a crucial cost management feature in pay-as-you-go systems.
• Some have speculated in a basic service available for everyone, but enhanced services if you join a library club, sign up for a newsletter or turn up at the physical library. The latter is rather ingenious and has many things going for it. However, it’s very obvious what you’re doing and it is quite the insult to people living far from the library who were supposed to benefit from e-lending.

None of these are really … sexy. At the satellite conference on e-lending at IFLA 2022 in Dublin, Stuart Hamilton of LGMA Ireland and myself ran a vox pop at the end including the question: “What is your favourite way of stopping digital lending?” The participants’ fidgeting and protests trying to answer was obvious. The whole business is just against every fiber in every library person’s body.

Friction does work
Denmark has the highest e-lending figure per capita of any national public library service in the world, I believe (8 mn. loans versus 5.8 mn. Danes in 2022). Our growth owes itself to many factors but one of the most important ones – if not the most important one – is that we have made friends with publishers. We have a close collaboration with them, because we acknowledge each other’s reality and we have found a lot of common ground that way. One concession we have made on our part is one we happily made. We don’t try to compete with commercial services on new bestsellers. We’ve tried to turn it into a strength that we focus on all the rest; especially Danish literature, narrow titles and children’s literature. Our top-10 every year for both ebooks and audiobooks have 8-9 children’s titles on it and half of those will be older ones. We have embraced friction.

We have also participated in large public-private partnerships on retro-digitisation of the Danish literary heritage. We helped select titles based on our specialized knowledge of library users, publishers digitised the books and we promoted these new old titles on eReolen. It turned out marvelously with retro-titles having the same number of loans as real new titles in the year of their entry. This did wonders for our kind of literature and solidified our brand in the eyes of all stakeholders.

If eReolen continues to grow at the rate of the last five years, the physical libraries cannot cope with their stagnant budgets. We will have to make further restraints on use or restrict the collection even further. There’s potential in cutting e.g. popular but lightweight literature such as translated romance or crime, but I also expect to see this kind of literature moving steadily to e-only making it more controversial to cut them from eReolen, but if we have to choose, I’d rather slim the collection that way than restrict all use.

A philosophical distinction
The most important factor to keeping the lion a cute cub versus letting it grow to more scary proportions is perhaps a philosophical one. E-lending has revealed quite a difference in how heads of libraries everywhere view the mission of the library and the role of its services. The differences in philosophy can be categorized in many ways and levels of granularity, but for our purpose here, the difference between what has been called (by my co-blogger) the agnostic view – i.e. it doesn’t matter how people read as long as they read – and the view that the library is first and foremost a physical institutions is important. With the first view e-lending may very well grow and grow, because it’s serving the purpose of reading (see my future post on the rise and rise of audiobooks though). E-lending is indistinguishable from the library’s core mission. With the physical view you will eye digital growth with suspicion and probably move to slow it down before it gets really out of hand though you may lack elegant tools to do so. E-lending in this view is a service among many and kept at that level.

A Danish head of a large public library used a phrase the other day I found hilarious. He talked about “the unbearable yoke of physical lending.” It’s fairly easy to see which general view he holds. Another library exec just stared blankly at him and so I put her in my book under the other view. It’s interesting to see how the incessant growth of e-lending reveals basic and up until now unvoiced assumptions of the nature of the public library.

Part II of this post will deal with the arguably more exciting vision of changing the library to accommodate the digital transformation in all its fangy and clawy glory.