DRM-Free E-Book ILL

The ability to lend e-books without DRM restrictions has developed exponentially from the 2010s. The consortia, libraries, and vendors included here have made strides to making e-book ILL more accessible by sharing replicable licensing language, articulating step-by-step workflows, and realizing the functionality to expand resource sharing services.

 

Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium (VIVA)

VIVA charted foundational pathways for libraries to be able to lend whole e-books through the DRM-free approach. In 2016, the consortium underwent an extensive RFP process and awarded four contracts for e-book collections, securing whole e-book lending rights from these publishers. To aid its membership in understanding how to lend these resources, a task force was created to develop recommended practices to loan whole e-books. 

The resources below touch on many parts of the process that have challenged the resource sharing community in building scalable practices for e-book interlibrary loan and have sparked the creativity of other innovators to further expand upon these foundations. 

🌐 VIVA Whole Ebook Lending

• An overview of VIVA’s process for exploring whole e-book ILL, including request for proposal (RFP) documentation sent to engage vendors in developing VIVA’s lendable e-book collection.

🌐 VIVA Whole Ebook Interlibrary Loan Recommendations

• Recommendations developed by VIVA’s Whole Ebook Lending Task Force to establish e-book ILL practices amongst member institutions including specific guidance for borrowing and lending, contract language to allow this type of digital lending, and suggestions for navigating different vendors and databases.

🌐 ▶️ VIVA Whole Ebook ILL Tutorials

• Video tutorials showing adaptable e-book ILL workflows for ILLiad, Tipasa, and WorldShareILL.

 

University of Connecticut (UConn)

A member of Boston Library Consortium, UConn built upon VIVA’s work to develop local practices for their institution to engage vendors and lend whole e-books from their digital collections. The resources below provide other avenues to adopting e-book ILL through additional software vendors (RapidILL and IDS) and detailed approaches to vendor engagement to include e-ILL rights in licenses.

▶️ Licensing and Interlibrary Lending of Whole Ebooks, Boston Library Consortium - 2022

• An overview of UConn’s process for instantiating whole e-book ILL including their core licensing principles and strategy in approaching vendors, the benefits and data from their early years of lending e-books, and a summary of their workflows utilizing RapidILL, ILLiad, and IDS Logic.

📜 Licensing and Interlibrary Lending of Whole Ebooks, written by Michael Rodriguez - 2021

• A written account of UConn’s process as described in the above webinar. 

 

Boston Library Consortium 

As part of our 2023 Strategic Action Plan, BLC identified the strategic priority to investigate consortial approaches to expand the interlibrary loaning of e-books. After a year of investigation from the E-Book Sharing Working Group, the committee released a report titled E-Book ILL Roadmaps: Charting Pathways for Broader Adoption of E-Book Interlibrary Loan. 

The report provides guidance for resource sharing practitioners, licensing negotiators, and systems managers to understand potential routes towards implementing DRM-free e-book interlibrary loan. While no two journeys for e-book lending are the same, the goal of the document is to further clarify the gray areas and make the process transparent and approachable for any library to lend e-books through interlibrary loan.

🌐 📜 E-Book ILL Roadmaps: Charting Pathways for Broader Adoption of E-Book Interlibrary Loan 

• A report providing step-by-step guidance on how to implement e-book ILL practices at your library, aggregating many of the above resources from VIVA and UConn. The roadmaps were honored with the 2025 ALA RUSA STARS Publication Recognition Award. 

▶️ Choose Your Own Adventure!: Developing E-Book ILL Roadmaps with the Boston Library Consortium, Northwest Interlibrary Loan (NWILL) Conference - 2024

• A webinar describing the development process for the roadmaps, the challenges of developing agnostic practices for e-book interlibrary loan, and identifying next steps towards broader adoption amongst our consortium and other libraries.

🌐 E-Book ILL Lender Tracker

• Originally developed by Dev Singer of Brandeis University, a vendor-neutral resource hosted by BLC to allow libraries to self-report the publishers and e-book collections they are able to lend through interlibrary loan. 

 

Rapido 

Ex Libris, part of Clarivate, has developed e-book ILL functionality in Rapido, the company’s resource sharing request management platform. Built upon both Alma and RapidILL’s infrastructure, this functionality was released in January 2025 and shows promise in vendors actively working to update their systems to reflect current library needs and the diverse growth of shareable material formats.

🌐 Rapido eBook functionality from January 2025 Release Notes

• Release notes identifying the full architecture in Rapido to set up e-book sharing, including screengrabs and a running list of known/resolved issues.

🌐 Rapido eBook Requests documentation

• Full documentation for both borrowing and lending configurations.

🌐 eBook Pod Configuration for Rapido - California State University System

• Guidance from the CSU Library System on confirming licenses that allow for e-book ILL, identifying e-book collections in Alma, and other pod configurations to allow for e-book sharing through Rapido.