The price of ebooks is too darn high. 

That’s the sentiment held by Edmonton Public Library and a larger coalition called the Canadian Public Libraries for Fair Ebook Pricing, which EPL joined more than a year ago. 

According to Sharon Karr, EPL’s manager of collection management, libraries tend to suffer from predatory ebook prices determined by the five largest book publishers in the world. 

These are, Hachette Book Group, HarperColllins, MacMillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster. 

“We want to raise awareness of the challenges faced by public libraries,” she said. 

“Libraries are often charged a much higher price for a single title of an ebook than a normal consumer would.”

This mark up, she said, can see an ebook cost a library from three to five times as much as it would a private citizen. 

“On top of the high prices, there are caps and time limits on the number of times you can use an ebook,” she said. 

“The bottom line is fewer titles are able to be purchased by libraries, and fewer copies of each title for readers to discover. The end result is long wait times for customers to get their hands on the book they want to read.”

EPL and its partners in this have recently published an open letter to the publishers airing their concerns. So far, Karr said, it has received around 20,000 page views so far. 

“We’ve advocated for a hybrid of existing models ... It would offer libraries choices about maintaining perpetual copies at a higher price, and other copies of the same title but at a lower price,” Karr said. 

Similarly, EPL hopes to reduce the price of ebooks from the $85 - $100 range to somewhere near $30 or $40.

“We realize there are challenges for the publishers as well. We’re just saying the higher prices we are seeing now aren’t sustainable.”

Smaller, independent publishers tend to not mark up the cost of their ebooks, she added.