Upsplash
We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, and yet books themselves are becoming harder to obtain. Prices rise, libraries strain, and even digital access comes with invisible expiration dates. The result is a quiet paradox: the more abundant knowledge becomes, the less equitably it is distributed.
I have long been a fervent devotee of Virginia Woolf, unquestionably among the greatest writers of the twentieth century. For nearly thirty years, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were central texts in my modern novel course. Most recently, I read her diary (1918–1941), an extraordinary record of a writer’s inner life and artistic evolution.
I had assumed that we possessed a full collection of Woolf’s extant letters—some 3,100 of them, published in six volumes spanning 1888–1941. Yet recent scholarship has uncovered more than 1,400 additional letters, now published by Edinburgh University Press. The problem, however, is cost: the retail price approaches $255 (£188), and the collection is unavailable in e-book form. What should be a scholarly enrichment becomes, for many readers, an inaccessible luxury.
Even in the digital age, book prices—especially for hardbacks, the staples of libraries, bookstores, and schools—continue to rise. I am fortunate to have a well-stocked independent bookstore nearby, yet like many such stores, it survives as much on gift merchandise and an in-house café as on book sales. Across the country, independent bookstores have declined, leaving some communities without any physical access to books.
School budgets are under comparable strain. In the United States, library funding has remained essentially flat in recent years, even as costs rise. More than half (58%) of school librarians reported restrictions on spending in 2023–24, up from 48% in 2020–21; some report being unable to purchase books (Cockcroft, 2024).
In the United Kingdom, 15% of secondary schools report having no library budget whatsoever, while 69% of those with budgets indicate that funding has remained static or declined, eroding real purchasing power (Reading Cloud, 2023). In England more broadly, school funding fell by 8.5% in real terms between 2009 and 2020, with predictable consequences for library acquisitions (Sibieta, 2021).
An underreported consequence is the strain on public libraries. Approximately 94–96% of public library funding derives from government sources—primarily local governments through property taxes, with supplementary state and federal support, including grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Only 4–6% comes from fines, fees, or philanthropy (Sweeney, 2025). This reliance on local funding creates a structural inequity: communities with weaker tax bases, often those most in need of library services, are least able to support them.
Yet public libraries remain indispensable. Roughly 17,000 public libraries in the United States receive more than 1.3 billion visits annually, exceeding the combined attendance of major professional sports leagues (Sweeney, 2025). They are not luxuries, but essential civic institutions: centers of learning, access, and communal life.
Recent federal policy has compounded these pressures. In March 2025, the administration of Donald Trump mandated reductions to the budget of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s only federal agency dedicated to library funding, as part of a broader effort to reduce government spending. A coalition of 21 state attorneys general successfully challenged these cuts in federal court, restoring funds that had amounted to just $266.7 million in 2024—approximately 0.003% of the federal budget, or roughly 75 cents per capita (NPR, 2025).
Meanwhile, the publishing industry has consolidated into five dominant firms—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan Publishers—three of them foreign-owned. Together, they exert enormous influence over what is published. Such consolidation reduces competition and contributes to rising prices.
Libraries face an additional burden in the form of digital licensing. Unlike consumers, who may purchase an e-book outright, libraries must often pay steep licensing fees; for example, $55 for a popular title that a consumer can buy for $15, and must repurchase access after a limited term, typically two years (Goode, 2024). If a library declines to renew, the title simply disappears from its collection. When high-demand titles—such as The Women by Kristin Hannah—are involved, libraries have little choice but to pay.
Efforts by states to legislate fairer licensing terms have thus far failed in the courts.
At the same time, Amazon dominates the market, controlling roughly 68% of e-book sales—rising to 83% when Kindle Unlimited is included—and an increasingly large share of print sales as well (eReaders Forum, 2024; WordsRated, 2024). Its Kindle Direct Publishing platform has democratized access to publishing, allowing authors to earn up to 70% royalties on certain e-books, but it does so within a system that further concentrates market power.
The result is a feedback loop: as platform dominance reshapes the market, major publishers compensate by raising prices, especially for institutional buyers such as libraries and schools, and by concentrating resources on high-profile authors and guaranteed bestsellers.
In 2017, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama secured a reported $65 million joint publishing deal with Penguin Random House for their memoirs, Becoming and A Promised Land (Weaver, 2017). Such advances reflect market realities but may also crowd out emerging voices.
We have, in other words, not resolved the paradox but deepened it. As prices rise, access narrows, and even our digital abundance proves conditional, knowledge becomes less a shared inheritance than a gated resource. What is at stake is not simply the cost of books, but the principle that they, and the intellectual life they sustain, belong to everyone.
–RJ
REFERENCES
Cockcroft, M. (2024, April 4). School library budgets remain strained. School Library Journal.
Goode, L. (2024). E-book licensing and libraries. GoTech.
Reading Cloud. (2023). UK school library funding report.
Sibieta, L. (2021). School funding trends in England. Institute for Fiscal Studies / Wiley.
Sweeney, P. (2025, September 4). Public library funding in the U.S. Candid.org.
Weaver, H. (2017, March 1). _The Obamas’ publishing deal. Vanity Fair.
NPR. (2025). Court restores IMLS funding.
eReaders Forum. (2024). E-book market share statistics.
WordsRated. (2024). Amazon book market share projections.
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