When libraries stop buying books

On university libraries and austerity

Amid the torrent of ominous headlines about book bans and laws targeting public librarians, it can be easy to lose track of an underreported set of stories on the university side of library news. And those developments in higher ed are worthy of attention, I think, since academic libraries are—to an extent that might surprise most readers—no longer buying books.

West Virginia University caused a minor stir when it was announced they’d stopped buying books altogether, a notable case tied to the wider scandals engulfing that university—a flagship in a state with a large budget surplus. While WVU’s complete halt to book-buying is comparatively rare, other universities, from Penn State to South Florida, are reported to have stopped all print acquisitions. And this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. As far back as 2018, before Covid and the push for austerity that the pandemic enabled, the University of California (to pick one example) was spending only 7 percent of its library budget on books of any kind. In other words: Academic libraries’ drift away from purchasing books is a response to the entwined crises that characterize higher education in 2024. But that’s only one part of a story with deeper roots.

Also in the mix, I think, are genuine intellectual differences about the role of libraries. Ask patrons what they think the campus library is for, and many are likely to say it provides them with access to books and journals—material purchased through collective investments because it’s useful for the university’s community. The thing is, academic librarians themselves often prefer, in my experience, to deemphasize their role as people who buy books for patrons to use. In my time directing a university press (a field where libraries once accounted for 70 percent of sales, now down to perhaps 20 percent and falling), I don’t remember any conference panels or op-eds about university libraries buying more books—about, say, publishers bringing the price of books down so libraries could purchase more of them. In fact, I was once told at a conference of library and publishing professionals that if library budgets were opened up by books becoming cheaper, the savings would be spent on something other than books. “Buy more books” just doesn’t feel like it’s part of the discourse, at least in my experience.

And some in the academic library community have framed things more aggressively, suggesting that books and journals should be available free from pirate and pirate-adjacent sites like Sci-Hub, Z-Library, and the Internet Archive’s “Emergency Library.” It’s a move—sometimes by librarians who align with the energy of punks, anarchists, and other insurgents—that seems to erase legitimate libraries. If everything’s a free PDF on a gray-market or illegal website, then what’s the point of supporting the un-punk library whose role includes providing legal access to books and journals?

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I sense the bigger trend is that the social democratic values supporting investments in books—including paying for them, especially if you’re a library, so that authors and publishing workers and others in the circuit can support themselves—are too often undermined by sexier political sentiments that involve anger at institutions and sticking it to The Man. The impulse is sometimes described as an anarchist intervention in social justice, but it is also, perhaps, a Silicon Valley flavor of libertarian.

With some academic library leaders now responding to a surprising (and in some sense counterintuitive) mix of intellectual and political traditions, I think they’ve occasionally ended up in a muddled place. The crisis at my former university seems indicative of what may be a wider trend, with library leaders—instead of pushing back publicly against disinvestment—sometimes seeming like willing agents of austerity. (An FAQ from the WVU Library, for example, depicted its dramatic budget cuts as part of an opportunity to “transform the current academic publishing landscape.”)

I should stress that there’s a lot going on when university libraries stop buying books, including a shift in budgets away from book-intensive humanities fields to journals-intensive STEM fields. Any one explanation would necessarily be reductive. What I want to suggest here, without assigning blame to specific individuals, is the way austerity policies have been successfully anticipated by ideas that, whatever their purported lineage, have in effect made their peace with austerity. Some of the proof is in protests that fail to materialize. That there are so few marches with chants of “fund the university library so they can go back to buying books!” is a sign that the sentiment may simply have become unimaginable.

I think it’s unfortunate. Anti-authoritarian Z-Library advocates may find traditional library functions hopelessly bourgeois, but those orderly institutions serve whole university communities and, in many cases, support a broad range of workers in culture and the arts along the way. As a fussy old guy who’s more socialist than punk, my hope is that legitimate university libraries receive robust funding to support the acquisition of books. I’d love to see a range of actors from across the spectrum coalesce around that agenda, which is pro-library, pro-publisher, pro-author, and ultimately pro-reader.