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Books in the US are in greater danger than you might think. Not only from widespread bans, nor even from the ferocious attacks by the federal government, which has so far this year attempted a takeover of the Library of Congress, removed volumes on gender and diversity from military libraries, and scheduled a “patriotic” review of collections at the Smithsonian. The biggest threat to books may in fact be the least known: the oligopoly of intermediaries controlling their distribution.

US libraries, universities, and bookstores rely for the delivery of books on a small number of very big profit-driven companies, many of them privately held, whose commitment to freedom of expression is at best uncertain. The list includes the Follett Corporation ($2.8 billion in annual revenues), Clarivate ($2.6 billion), EBSCO Industries ($3.1 billion), KKR ($22.7 billion), and Ingram Industries ($2.7 billion). Each of these companies represents a potential chokepoint for books and periodicals. They all exercise near-monopolistic control over a piece of the distribution chain, with the capacity to render whole catalogues of e-books inaccessible to library patrons, or to university students, or online book buyers, at the flick of a switch.

Nearly all publishers of newspapers, magazines, and commercial books, as well as the tens of thousands of small, independent, and academic publishers, rely on these same few companies to get their books into libraries, schools, and bookstores. Industry consolidation means that publishers have little choice but to sign contracts advantageous to distributors and the lifelines to revenues they offer, while having little negotiating power with respect to terms.

In the case of e-books, where these near monopolies have consolidated and solidified over the past decade, the danger of a sudden loss of access is particularly acute. When you borrow and read an e-book at your library, for example, that transaction is almost certainly handled by the country’s largest private equity company, KKR. The firm currently controls as much as 90 percent of library e-book loans through its OverDrive/Libby platform, according to a 2023 report from Library Journal. 

And then there is Amazon, which currently commands north of 80 percent of the e-book market. A look at its business practices is illustrative of the general vulnerability of digital books to the potential whims of a monopolistic distributor. Nobody likes to read those infernal terms and conditions, but the fact is that nearly all the digital books you can “buy” on Amazon remain in the control of Amazon. The first sentence of the “Use of Kindle Content” section of Amazon’s T&C reads, in bold type, “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider,” and things pretty much go downhill from there. The company reserves the right to terminate your use of “the Service” (i.e., reading the books you bought—sorry, licensed—from it) for any number of reasons. Unlike with paper books, you’re not allowed to give away or resell a digital book you bought to read on a Kindle; your access to it is entirely reliant on “the Service.” You don’t own a Kindle book, you just buy a chance to read it at the pleasure of Amazon.

The potential cost of leaving your e-books in the hands of Amazon was dramatically illustrated as early as 2009, when the company deleted e-book copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of people who had bought them. (The company explained that these particular e-books had been pirated through a self-publishing option on Amazon, and sold on without permission from rights holders.)

Jeff Bezos has been widely excoriated for his failure to protect the editorial independence and integrity of the Washington Post, which he owns; he is still Amazon’s largest shareholder, with direct power over the ongoing availability of millions of people’s digital libraries. If the Trump administration should command Amazon to stop selling any book, or books, I for one have little confidence that the company would fight for people’s right to read.

It will take years to repair the damage this administration has already done to American universities, museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions. But those of us who care about the vital work of publishers have at least one ace in the hole.

Today, a lot of compelling journalism is published in independent newsletters on platforms like Ghost and Substack. New and important criticism, interviews, articles, and essays are flooding into the culture via newsletter all the time. One of the primary draws of this publishing route for independent journalists is the ownership of their own publishing rights. If writers don’t have to sell their rights to publishers in the first place, they can control how their work is sold and disseminated. What if writers could sell (really sell, not license) their e-books and newsletters straight to the library?

When I was growing up in Southern California, I read magazines in the periodicals room of the Long Beach Public Library. My library had a huge collection of paper magazines it could loan to magazine-crazed teens forever, just the same way libraries were free to buy, own, and loan out their paper books.

This is the model that Brick House, the writers’ cooperative I belong to, is working to create. We’ve asked hundreds of small publishers to join us in developing a safe passage, free of intermediaries, between authors, publishers, libraries, and readers. Lots of publishers and authors have signed on. And many more would love to—but they can’t, because they’re bound by contracts with those intermediaries that demand exclusive rights for distributing their books. Publishers caught in that trap can only provide libraries with e-books to license temporarily—books for rent, books that can expire, books that can be shut off.

Journalism is in the same boat as books. Nearly all newspaper and magazine archives in US libraries are subject to the same exclusive, rental-only distribution agreements—vulnerable to billion-dollar companies that are in control of literary heritage, but unaccountable to anyone.

This is why building open-source models to connect publishers and libraries directly is imperative. It’s an important step in restoring the traditional role of libraries as a permanent repository of books and periodical literature.

Irreparable damage has already been done to universities, libraries, schools, and research institutions by Republicans who are working frantically to dismantle the country’s literary culture, a linchpin of democracy. But writers, journalists, and educators still have opportunities to preserve and rebuild these institutions, and we must seize them now. Protecting and strengthening library collections is a crucial shield for our culture in this dark moment.

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