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[Massachusetts addresses the high costs and restrictive licensing of e-books through ongoing legislative efforts focused on public library access. Instead of directly mandating retail price caps—which publishers have successfully challenged in other states—Massachusetts is leveraging research commissions and contract reform to combat artificially inflated costs. For example, last November, the Massachusetts Senate voted unanimously for an Act, (S.2710), that would create a special legislative commission to assess and address challenges faced by public libraries and digital resource collections. Neighboring Rhode Island has now taken an important step, too, but tempered with a key caveat.]
by Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current
June 22, 2026
It can be costly for Rhode Island’s public libraries to keep up with popular demand for digital copies of the latest bestsellers.
While print books are limited by the number of physical copies available, publishers get creative with how to restrain the supply of e-books. So digital materials are often locked within licensing terms that meter access and cut it off after a certain amount of time or checkouts.
“Metered access titles make up an increasing percentage of digital collections, leading to a large amount of budgets going to repurchase titles,” Rhode Island Library Association President Kiki Butler said in an email. “Repurchasing titles of bestselling authors over and over leads to less funds to purchase new, local or emerging authors.”
Legislation that became law last week addresses the contractual relationships allowed between book licensors and publishers and taxpayer-funded libraries. But it won’t take effect immediately and will require several other states to buy in.
The pair of companion bills that passed on June 11, the last day of the 2026 legislative session, was drafted by the eBook Study Group, a national outfit which has worked nationwide to regulate e-book pricing and contracts. On June 18, Gov. Dan McKee allowed the measure to become law without his signature.
The new law would bar libraries from entering into or renewing certain digital licensing contracts that interfere with what the bill defines as these institutions’ core operations, such as interlibrary loans or collection building efforts.
Other provisions in the bill include barring licensors from charging “a price greater than that charged to the public for the same item” for electronic materials, demanding a cost-per-circulation fee, or limiting how many times an electronic item could be checked out by library patrons over the course of the licensing period.
In her testimony on the bills during legislative hearings this session, the Library Association’s Butler cited the case of “The Correspondent,” a 2025 novel by Virginia Evans which had at one point accumulated a waitlist of 1,500 readers for the audiobook or digital copies — demand which led Rhode Island libraries to spend more than $3,400 on licenses for this one book alone, with many of those licenses set to expire at the end of 2026. Another $2,300 would be needed to supply enough licenses for all those waiting, Butler testified.
As of Monday, “The Correspondent” still had 732 people on the audiobook waitlist, and another 721 in line for a digital copy.
In 2025, public libraries in the state spent more than $500,000 on e-books and digital audiobooks, Stephen Spohn, the executive director of Ocean State Libraries, said in an email to Rhode Island Current. But not all licenses are created or priced equally, Spohn noted. Consider two audiobooks, both among the top checkouts of 2026 so far, he said.
“One is made available to libraries under great terms, and it only costs about $1 per checkout,” Spohn wrote.
The other top checkout, Spohn said, “costs nearly $4 per checkout.”
“That difference magnified by 1.5 million checkouts per year is staggering and diminishes our ability to serve library patrons,” he wrote.
The legislation — sponsored this year by Sen. Mark McKenney, a Warwick Democrat, and Rep. Lauren Carson, a Newport Democrat — has popped up for several years at the State House. Its success this year follows Connecticut’s passage of similar legislation last year, and other states — including New Jersey, Illinois and Minnesota — have or are considering comparable legislation, Kyle Courtney, an attorney and founder of the eBook Study Group, said in an email.
“Rather than treading on federal copyright territory, we rooted the bill firmly in the state’s traditional powers to regulate contracts, protect public resources, and prevent unconscionable, unfair practices against its own public entities,” Courtney said.
Library advocates, Courtney said, have been “working on this for over a decade” and have been “seeding this concept with the Rhode Island legislature for years.” But this year’s bill “was smarter, more resilient, and directly informed by previous legal challenges.”
One of the advantages the bill had this year was that it avoided encroaching on questions of federal copyright law and instead used the state’s own powers to regulate contracts and protections for public entities like libraries, Courtney said.
Another advantage, Courtney added, is that the bill won’t take effect without other states’ efforts, which he said was designed to forge “a safety-in-numbers, cooperative framework” and “address concerns about a single state acting alone.”
The bills’ activation is contingent on at least four other states, with a combined population of at least 10 million, enacting similar laws that create enforceable limits on contract terms for electronic book or digital audiobook licensing.
“Legislators in both chambers understood that unless something was done, this issue was going to continue to escalate during a time when municipal budgets are stretched,” Julie Holden, assistant director of Cranston Public Library and membership chair of the Rhode Island Library Association, said.
Publishers have a different take on the legislation. In an email, John McKay, a spokesperson for the Association of American Publishers, said the bills “strip authors of their rights.”
“This unconstitutional legislation limits their ability to make a living and dictates what authors and creators can and cannot do with their own work,” McKay wrote. “When a new movie is released, the government does not force it to be immediately made available for free on a public streaming platform, without just compensation for its creators. But that is what this bill would do to authors and the entire ecosystem involved in turning ideas into the stories that readers love.”
The bill, McKay added, exhibits “profound disregard for author rights” and “grants the government alarming power to decide which books are accessible to Rhode Island readers and jeopardizes library access to digital books.”
Similar legislation was vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2021 and “rejected in several other state legislatures across the country due to its conflict with settled federal law,” McKay said.
Spohn, meanwhile, offered that libraries “connect readers to books and to new and emerging authors, creating a lifelong love of reading that translates into both library lending and consumer sales.”
“Libraries are partners in the publishing industry alongside publishers, authors and readers, yet we are not seen that way by the larger publishers,” Spohn wrote.
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Rhode Island Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com.
