Morrissey recently co-wrote a report on the subject for the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) called “Preserving E-books” with Amy Kirchhoff, an archive services product manager at Portico, a digital archive. In the report, Morrissey and Kirchhoff conclude that the burden of ensuring “long-term, permanent access” to licensed e-books is dangerously ill-defined, and that the preservation of e-books is in a tenuous state, rife with ambiguous responsibilities, rights, and questions about cost.
“A key issue is the ownership model for e-books, or, more correctly, the non-ownership model,” Kirchhoff explains. Because most e-books are licensed to a library or to an individual reader, and not owned, libraries cannot ensure the stability of their e-book collection as they have maintained physical collections over the years. “Publishers can, and have, removed content, or modified e-book content,” she adds, “and there are few explicit protocols for propagating such modifications to e-book content.”