Illinois Digital Library Protection Act Advances — AAP Mounts Opposition as Library Ebook Crisis Deepens
Illinois House Bill 5236, the Digital Library Protection Act, advanced out of the House Consumer Protection Committee on March 24, 2026. The bill restricts publishers from imposing terms that prevent libraries from performing customary lending functions, including simultaneous lending and time restrictions on the same digital licence. The Association of American Publishers opposes the bill, comparing it to the struck-down 2021 Maryland law, though proponents argue the new contract-law framework — first adopted by Connecticut in 2025 — is fundamentally different and constitutionally sound.
Analysis
The Illinois Digital Library Protection Act is the most important piece of library ebook legislation since Maryland's 2021 law — and it has been carefully designed to avoid Maryland's fate.
The Maryland law was struck down on the grounds that it conflicted with federal copyright law by attempting to regulate the terms under which copyrighted works could be licensed. The new wave of legislation, beginning with Connecticut in 2025 and now advancing in Illinois, takes a different approach: it operates under contract law rather than copyright law. Instead of telling publishers what they can and cannot do with their intellectual property, it restricts the terms of contracts that publishers can offer to libraries — a distinction that its architects argue is constitutionally defensible in a way that the Maryland approach was not.
The AAP's comparison of HB 5236 to the Maryland law is therefore either a strategic mischaracterisation or a genuine misreading of the legal architecture. The association's opposition is understandable — the bill would materially constrain publishers' ability to impose simultaneous lending limits and time-based licence expiry on the same contract — but the constitutional argument that worked in 2021 may not work here.
The underlying economics are stark. Illinois libraries currently pay nearly four times the consumer price for ebooks that eventually expire. A library purchasing a physical book pays once and lends it indefinitely; a library purchasing a digital licence under current terms pays a premium price for a product that disappears after a set number of loans or a fixed period. The Words & Money framing — that digital lending has reached a "crisis point" — reflects a genuine operational reality for public library systems that are being asked to serve growing digital demand with budgets that have not kept pace.
If Illinois succeeds where Maryland failed, the contract-law framework becomes a national template. The AAP knows this, which is why its opposition is so vigorous. The outcome of HB 5236 will determine whether state legislatures have a viable path to reforming library ebook licensing, or whether publishers can continue to rely on federal copyright pre-emption as a shield against state-level intervention.