Opinion

Publishers Are Using E-books to Extort Schools and Libraries

FUTURE SHOCK

The big publishers’ ultimate goal is to turn e-books into assets that libraries and schools can only rent, and never own. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

opinion
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Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast / Photos via Getty

During a rough pandemic year of distance learning, e-books—cheap to distribute, searchable, easy to annotate, and accessible on devices that students use every day—became the default choice in many schools.

So you might think that e-books should be freely available to teachers and students to use in the same ways they’ve...

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