Canadian Public Libraries for Fair Ebook Pricing – a coalition formed by the Canadian Library Association, the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, the Ontario Library Association and the Toronto Public Library – is publicly demanding lower ebook prices from publishers.

“Some multinational publishers charge libraries as much as three to five times more for ebooks than the consumer price, while others place caps and time limits on use. This means there are fewer titles and copies for readers to discover,” says a press release circulated by the Canadian Library Association Ebook Task Force and the Toronto Public Library.

TPL City librarian Vickery Bowles cites in the same release that ebooks are the fastest growing area of circulation for the library, which finds current pricing “unreasonably high.” This, she says, impedes the library’s ability to provide for its patrons.

Bowles is heading a Twitter initiative to raise awareness of the issue today.

“I don’t think the issue is reducible to a hashtag,” says John Degen, executive director of the Writers’ Union of Canada. “Making a simplistic comparison between a retail price for a book and an institutional price, and then branding the higher price ‘unfair’ ignores the very real differences between consumer and institutional uses of the product.”

Degen points out that author royalties are based on the volume of copies, whether print or digital, that are sold. Generally, reaching a certain number of readers takes many more consumer copies than reaching the same number of readers through the library system. And, though libraries increase both visibility of an author and reader engagement, there is no way to make up the loss in author royalties that would have been seen through the sale of more consumer copies.

“Reaching 1,000 readers through standard retail sales means 500 books or more sold, with a royalty to the author for each of those copies,” Degen says. “The market price is relatively low – lower still for e-books – and the royalty is made up on volume. Reaching 1,000 readers through the library system could mean the sale of a single book, which means you reduce the combined royalty for all those readers by a factor of 500. That’s an immense loss for an individual.”

Degen suggests it’s not the publishers’ pricing that is to blame, but a lack of funding to libraries – something the union and authors alike advocate.

“Institutional pricing is higher than retail pricing because the relationship between the book business and public libraries would not work otherwise.  Books don’t magically appear; it takes an industry to feed library demand, and industries [and authors] need to make money.”