Authors Alliance Backs Illinois HB5236 and the Broader State Ebook Licensing Effort

Authors Alliance is pleased to announce our collaboration with the eBook Study Group on a joint statement supporting Illinois HB5236, the Digital Library Protection Act, which passed the Illinois House without a single no vote and now heads to the Senate. The bill is a measured response to a major problem:  Illinois libraries are spending large amounts of public dollars on ebook license contracts that undermine patron privacy, block ordinary library functions, and make it more difficult for libraries to buy and maintain a ebook collection of works from a broad range of authors. 

Our support for this kind of legislation is not new. We wrote in 2021 about the first wave of state efforts in Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island, and in 2022 we endorsed model legislation as a careful response to the copyright preemption questions raised by the Maryland litigation. The current generation of bills, which includes Connecticut’s 2025 landmark law, HB5236 in Illinois, and similar measures in other states, reflects a careful approach that does not dictate prices or compel publishers or authors to license. Rather,  they focus on the terms libraries may agree to, ensuring those terms are consistent with libraries’ public mission of lending, access, and preservation.

Allowing libraries to fulfill their public service mission matters greatly to many authors. Libraries are where readers find authors of mid-list and debut books they would not otherwise encounter, and they remain a critical means of discovering authors’ backlist books even after commercial demand has faded. 

Public library collection budgets are currently dominated by spending with a small number of big publishers who insist that libraries re-license works repeatedly to maintain access and that charge libraries, in some cases, 10x or more the retail price. The result is that many libraries can only maintain access to a small number of high-demand bestsellers, and other authors are left entirely off libraries’ digital shelves. We made this point last month in our letter to the Minnesota Legislature supporting HF 3698 / SF 3685, and it applies with equal force in Illinois.

We will continue to support these efforts as they move through state legislatures, and we encourage authors who agree to make their voices heard. You can read more about these bills and the issues they seek to address on the eBook Study Group’s substack, here.