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While it may seem odd, there are not many difficulties in adapting this model to the digital world: instead of buying a book and throwing it away after forty people check it out, a library simply buys a license to circulate an ebook forty times. Functionally, it’s the same. The problem is that where previously libraries could buy any book they liked on the open market for the same price that any individual would pay, the move to digital licensing allows publishers to enforce more fine-grained “library pricing.” Now, instead of paying $10.39 on Amazon for a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and circulating that book until it falls apart, libraries will have to pay whatever publishers demand for the right to circulate a book a set number of times—probably a lot more than $10.39. It’s likely as well that libraries will eventually be competing with the literary equivalent of Netflix for the right to circulate ebooks. But while this new regime may force circulating libraries to cut back on the number of titles they provide, it won’t threaten their basic existence. Once publishers determine the market price to circulate a book, they will be all too happy to charge libraries that price.

At the moment, most licensing arrangements for university libraries are set up so that students and faculty can log in and use the databases not just from the physical library but from anywhere in the world, twenty-four hours a day. University libraries can afford to pay for comprehensive access because they have a limited and well-defined user base—in the case of NYU, around 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. The New York Public Library can’t buy similar licenses because it has 1.9 million cardholders. “When a publisher hears that they get very nervous,” Denise Hibay, the library’s head of collection development, told me. That’s because if the New York Public Library did somehow persuade a company like ProQuest to let it buy licenses on the cheap, then NYU (and every other college and university in town) could just stop paying ProQuest and tell all their students who want access to sign up for a library card and log in through the New York Public Library.

We assume that the internet can only make it easier and cheaper to access information, but what the internet really does, when it’s commercialized, is commodify information. In the future, publishers will be able to determine exactly how often a specific book or article is accessed, try a few different prices, and charge whatever turns out to be most profitable. If that profit can be generated by selling advertising, then the book will be made available “for free”; if not, users will be forced to pay. In the case of romance novels, this means “ad-supported books”; in the case of scholarly journals, if you don’t have an institution to support you, it means paying $5.99 to “rent” a single article for one day, the price currently being charged by Cambridge University Press.