James Patterson's Latest Op-Ed is Another Work of Publisher Fiction
The publishers' latest salvo against eBook state laws is to send in their millionaire author clients to repeat their false copyright and market claims
You know you are striking a nerve when national publisher groups start driving a digital sign truck around the Rhode Island legislature to try and kill a library eBook bill.
Between the aggressive letter-writing campaigns and the literal circling of the wagons in Providence, one thing is clear: we must be getting to them.
The momentum for fair library eBook licensing is building nationwide, and the publishing oligopoly is panicking.
Instead of engaging with the actual text of these bills, the Big Five are deploying multi-millionaire authors like James Patterson to act as human shields. Patterson recently penned an op-ed attacking state library eBook legislation, including Rhode Island’s pending bills (H 7606 and S 2525).
Given the sheer volume of fabricated information and fear-mongering in his piece, it’s clear Mr. Patterson should stick to writing fiction.
If we are going to debate how taxpayer dollars are spent on digital lending, we need to ground the conversation in reality, not publishing industry spin. We just want eBook licenses to reflect the library mission using state law. Here is the truth about what these bills do, and what they don’t.
[NOTE: ESG’s official op-ed, responding to James Patterson in The Providence Journal is here]
The Copyright Distraction
The Fiction: Patterson claims in his op-ed that these bills “strip writers of their copyright” and let state governments “seize control” of intellectual property.
The Reality: State legislatures cannot alter federal copyright law, and these bills don’t even try. This legislation is strictly about state contract law, state consumer protection, and the responsible procurement of goods using public state funds. It simply creates the terms under which corporate publishers can contract with publicly funded institutions for eBooks.
The Financial Reality of the Writer
The Fiction: Patterson argues that libraries are “hurting authors’ livelihoods” and that fair licensing will destroy the working-class writer.
The Reality: Libraries do not pay authors; publishers pay authors. Right now, publishers are forcing libraries to pay five to ten times as much for an e-book or digital audiobook as they charge a regular consumer. Worse, these licenses are often temporary, expiring after a set number of months or checkouts. Under a standard contract, a library might be forced to repurchase a digital title after just 26 checkouts or two years of time passing, whichever comes first.
This is a manufactured expiration date designed by the publishers to extract recurring revenue. When publishers extract these astronomical, repeating fees from library budgets, it’s the corporations lining their pockets, not the creators.
Because libraries are forced to spend disproportionate chunks of their limited, taxpayer-funded budgets re-licensing massively expensive bestsellers over and over, they actually cannot afford to buy books by smaller, newer, or local authors. Fair e-book licensing laws stretch public dollars further, allowing libraries to diversify their collections and support more writers, not fewer.
The Ephemeral Collection
Beyond the devastating financial impact, these restrictive contracts are quietly destroying the foundational library mission of preservation and resource sharing. For centuries, libraries have purchased materials, preserved them for future generations, and shared them across communities through interlibrary loan networks.
The current eBook licensing model obliterates this. By forcing libraries to accept exploding licenses that vanish after 26 checkouts, publishers are essentially creating an ephemeral digital culture. Libraries are being transformed from curators of enduring, shared public knowledge into mere rental storefronts holding temporary access codes.
We do not want our libraries to
A library cannot preserve what it is not allowed to own, and it cannot share what a corporate contract legally walls off from neighboring communities.
The Legal Hammer: State Sovereignty and Public Funds
If you want to know how legally sound these bills actually are, look no further than Connecticut, where a fair eBook licensing law has already passed.
During the legislative process for Connecticut’s House Bill 5312 and Senate Bill 148, librarians, library consortia, and readers across Connecticut, the Connecticut Solicitor General, and our own eBook Study Group submitted testimony making the state’s position crystal clear. Opponents of the legislation had implicitly and explicitly threatened litigation.
According to the testimony, the facts regarding the intersection of state law and library eBook contracts are fairly straightforward.
First, this is about public money rather than private commerce. The legal foundation of these bills rests on bedrock constitutional principles regarding state sovereign police powers. These bills are a direct exercise of that traditional authority to establish, regulate, and fund public libraries. The legislation regulates how the government spends public money in the public interest, not how private publishers do business across state lines.
Second, copyright is irrelevant here. Because the bills do not regulate publishers at all, neither the Copyright Act (nor the Commerce Clause) has anything to say here. Finally, publishers have no freestanding right to contract with state or local government. Nobody has a right to compel misplaced state spending on unfair contracts.
The Momentum is Building
Throwing AI data mining and book bans into an argument about library purchasing contracts, as Patterson did, is an absurd distraction tactic. Public libraries are the frontline defenders against book bans. Claiming that libraries are somehow “attacking” writers is a deeply insulting mischaracterization of our mission.
It is deeply ironic that publishers claim these bills will harm authors when the current, unregulated system is mathematically designed to squeeze out diverse and emerging voices.
By locking libraries into non-negotiable, exorbitant contracts for top-tier bestsellers, the Big Five are draining the exact collection development funds that would otherwise be used to discover, purchase, and champion mid-list, debut, and independent authors.
Fair library licensing restores a competitive balance that allows public institutions to support the broader creative ecosystem, rather than functioning as an ATM for a handful of publishing conglomerates.
Authors aren’t deciding anything; billion-dollar publishing conglomerates are dictating non-negotiable, exorbitant, and predatory contracts to our public institutions.
But the tide is turning.
Beyond Connecticut’s success, we are seeing legislative momentum in New Jersey, Illinois, and Minnesota. If the Big Five publishers are going to continue treating libraries not as partners in literacy, but as a captive revenue stream to be exploited, it is time for a change in eBook licensing.
We don’t protect authors by letting corporate publishers hold public library budgets hostage. Let’s pass these bills, ignore the digital sign trucks, and restore balance to the digital reading economy.
This is excellent! Will you be editing this into an op-ed to submit to The Providence Journal so they can publish both views?