Hoopla and CloudLibrary serve public libraries only, with no schools or academic institutions; the Palace Project describes itself as built exclusively for libraries. The Palace Project, Micah May explained, is a nonprofit-driven ebook and audiobook distribution platform that grew out of a project he started at the New York Public Library in 2012, first called Library Simplified. The goal is to put libraries "more in the driver's seat": control over the patron relationship, data privacy and how books are surfaced on the digital shelf.

Hoopla Digital (Brad Rose) is part of Midwest Tape, which has supplied libraries with physical media since 1989. Hoopla launched in 2013 as a multimedia platform that combines TV, movies, music, audiobooks and ebooks in a single app. CloudLibrary (Heather McCormack) was founded at 3M around 2011 or 2012, when, by her recollection, downloading a library ebook took more than twenty steps. Since 2024 the platform has belonged to the library nonprofit OCLC.

At the center of the discussion were the business models of digital lending. According to Albanese, the foundation of the business is still the controversial license HarperCollins introduced fifteen years ago: one copy, 26 lends, then it expires. "There were talks of boycotts. It was really tense," he recalled. Rose said the model has since come full circle; McCormack agreed and called it perhaps the most preferred model after perpetual "one copy, one user" licenses, which she sees predominantly at smaller publishers and some larger independent presses. She was not sure the market had reached its optimum yet.

The sharpest criticism was directed at time-based licenses, especially the two-year model used by a few of the Big Five. Books fall out of collections after two years, and the repurchase rate is very low, May said, potentially less than ten percent for most of the big publishers. "You want your three, four, five year old book to still be in a library." A selector can't justify repurchasing a four- or five-year-old title that will expire again after two years, so collections become heavily bestseller-driven, the opposite of what libraries want. Models metered by the number of lends rather than by time work much better, May said; Palace offers, among others, a model of 40 lends, ten at a time. He also described a recently launched Palace model that lets libraries own their digital books, with rights modeled on those for a print copy: it remains one copy, one user, and according to May more than 200,000 books are available under it. Libraries, he said, can feel secure in what they have purchased.

Rose cautioned that whether a 26-lend license is fair depends on the list price: at a list price of 500 dollars, it is still very expensive per lend. Hoopla offers all the major models, he said, but came to market in 2013 with pay-per-use, focused on discovery. When a library switches Hoopla on, the entire catalog goes live, and more than half a million unique ebook titles are checked out annually. For midlist and backlist titles, Rose said, the library is the best place to live: "It is the place for discovery."

McCormack praised a pivotal moment: Penguin Random House's pandemic terms in spring 2020, when the publisher made its complete list available in both audio and ebook on one-year and two-year licenses and on a pay-per-use model. That, she said, showed the rest of the industry that libraries are "a bona fide market adjacent to the retail market." Since COVID there has been "an absolute explosion of open mindedness," with more flexibility in models. Yet the bulk of a monthly budget still goes out every Tuesday to new releases, usually adult fiction by "the usual suspects." Little is left for the backlist, and what is left tends to go into the monthly pay-per-use pot, which runs out. One fundamental difference from print remains: under US first-sale doctrine, McCormack noted, libraries do not own digital content, they own the right to a license.

Audio, Albanese noted, now drives an enormous part of digital demand in libraries. At CloudLibrary, McCormack said, audio started outselling ebooks two years ago. Romantic fantasy has displaced mystery/thriller/suspense as the long-time number one library genre, together with fusions of romance, fantasy and, increasingly, horror, which to her signals a younger reading base. "If you're a librarian out there, do not forget Gen Z," she appealed.

May pointed out that audiobook licenses at most of the Big Five are perpetual; in his view this shows that the model works, doesn't harm markets and is probably the better one. He also reminded the audience of audio's accessibility value, for instance for people with dyslexia or physical limitations that make reading hard.

Rose traced libraries' support for audio back to Midwest Tape's days in physical media and said the convenience of digital changed everything. Retail audio, he noted, tends to be credit- or time-based, and an Audible subscription in the US costs roughly 180 dollars, "a significant investment." His favorite proof came from a promotion: Pottermore made a Harry Potter title available at essentially no cost across retail platforms, including YouTube, and to library providers, and checkouts on Hoopla skyrocketed anyway. "People listen where they like to listen, they read where they wanna read."

"So now the fun starts," Albanese announced, and delivered a short history of escalation. The last time the issue was discussed at length at Frankfurt was 2018, when John Sargent of Macmillan was a guest, just after Macmillan had introduced its Tor embargo, which eventually covered the entire company. Then came the pandemic: people who could visit neither bookstores nor libraries discovered digital, and digital demand in libraries skyrocketed and, in Albanese's view, will not fall back. After the pandemic things calmed down: Macmillan abandoned its embargo, and Penguin Random House eased its terms. But the talked-about "reset" did not materialize.

The pandemic experience led to the first US library ebook law, in Maryland in 2021. It was about equity of access: a publisher that offered an ebook license to consumers had to offer one to libraries as well. The law was struck down because state law was preempted by copyright, which does not allow anyone to be compelled to offer a license. Now, in 2026, there is a new push for library ebook legislation in several states. The bills have passed in a few states but have not actually been enacted yet, Albanese said, though the effort is gaining steam. They take a different approach: they regulate libraries rather than publishers, barring them from signing contracts on terms that are unfair to libraries. No publisher is compelled to do anything, but the hope is that the laws will bring larger publishers to the table; the states' stake is that taxpayer money is spent equitably and properly. Albanese described the Big Five, who control the vast majority of library demand, as able to charge higher prices and impose more restrictive terms, which limits libraries' ability to collect widely and diversely.

May noted that even the big houses know libraries benefit authors: Penguin (before it was acquired by Random House) and Simon & Schuster pulled out of the library market around 2010 and later came back, having concluded from their own internal analysis that being in libraries is good for authors. The new laws, he said, rest on a consumer-protection theory, long the domain of the states, and are therefore unlikely to be struck down on federal copyright preemption as the Maryland law was. What they require is reasonable pricing, which seems reasonable on its face; the next debate will be over what a reasonable price is. Those pushing for the legislation are looking at a cost per lend of perhaps under two dollars, without time expirations.