Legislative Action is pleased to announce that legislation regarding the fair licensing of library ebooks in the state of Rhode Island has become law. The new law is in response to the struggles the state’s publicly-funded libraries have been having with the exceptionally high prices and disappearing licenses offered from the publishing industry. Legislative Action has been working on different versions of this bill since 2020.

“For the past several years, most major publishers are currently charging libraries up to ten times the cost of ebooks and audiobooks than they are charging consumers," said Kiki Butler, President of RILA. “Because the ebooks are licenses, they are set to expire after 12 or 24 months, or a small number of checkouts, and then our libraries must repurchase ebooks and audiobooks over and over again to meet demand, at the same high prices each time. It’s unsustainable.”

Legislative Action committee members Julie Holden, Eileen Dyer, Aimee Fontaine, and President Kiki Butler testified at hearings for House bill 7606, introduced by Rep. Lauren Carson (D, District 75) and Senate bill 2525, introduced by Senator Mark McKenney (D, District 30). These identical bills use our state’s contract law and consumer protection law to put RI libraries on a fair playing field in the marketplace. However, the Rhode Island law will not go into effect until four other states pass similar laws, known as a "trigger clause."

The bills were written using the nonprofit eBook Study Group model legislation. Similar legislation has become law in Connecticut and Washington DC, and might soon become law in New Jersey and Illinois, pending the outcomes of their respective sessions.

RILA thanks lawmakers at the General Assembly for the near-unanimous vote to bring these bills over the finish line; our RILA lobbyists Kaitlyn Alves and Robert Jacquard for their tremendous work, Rep. Joseph Solomon Jr. (D, District 22) and Senator Hanna Gallo (D, District 27) for their steadfast leadership at the committee level; Stephen Spohn of Ocean State Libraries, Legislative Action Chair Cheryl Space, and Vice Chair Ed Garcia for their guidance and support; and the many, many RILA members who wrote letters of support and spoke up across the state about this issue.