Genevieve Luthy

If you went and bought an audio book from Audible or Kobo store, you'd be paying significantly less than what libraries pay.

That's right.

Yeah.

So, so there's a couple of things.

One is that the actual copy costs more, but then most of the time when we are purchasing a license for an audio book, it's a limited time period.

So sometimes it's two years, sometimes it's based on number of checkouts, so 24 checkouts.

So we're sort of paying more twice, right?

We pay more for the actual, to actually purchase the, each copy of a book or audio book.

And then we are getting it for a limited amount of time.

So that is something that's definitely a challenge for libraries.

And we're always working with publishers to try to make those costs more sustainable for libraries because it is a challenge for library budgets to manage the demand when the costs are so high.

Yeah.

And sometimes we only have one option, right?

So sometimes there is an option.

Sometimes we can buy something that's called metered access 100.

So that means we have 100 people can check it out and then it doesn't exist anymore.

We have to repurchase it.

Sometimes we can buy it on a two year license.

Sometimes the only model that we can purchase is a 24 accesses.

So it really is dependent on the publisher what we're able to do.