The relationships between publishers, booksellers (or agents) and libraries have always been characterized by certain ambiguities. In some ways these three groups are mutually supportive, in other ways they are competitors. For example, libraries buy books, thus providing income for publishers and retailers. But they also lend books, thus perhaps depriving publishers and retailers of potential sales.
In recent years, electronic marketing has disturbed the traditional balance of power in this triangle of mutual dependency. In particular, it has given publishers a royal road to the consumer, bypassing retailers and libraries. Although libraries do continue to act as intermediaries between users and publishers, the long back runs of journals, which used to be the glory of their collections, are fast disappearing.
To make matters worse, libraries are increasingly confronted by high ``institutional'' prices. The rationale of high institutional pricing is that libraries are giving access to numerous individuals, and should be prepared to pay accordingly. But surely libraries are actually helping publishers to sell their product, both by endorsing it and by distributing information about it in numerous ways.
Perhaps publishers should make journals free to libraries? This might actually cause the number of personal subscriptions to rise, through increased exposure to potential subscribers. Possibly library subscriptions are not such a drain on publishers as the latter would have us believe. And the experiment might prove (as many suspect) that institutional pricing is really just a case of what the market will bear.
Although publishing is a business, and libraries in a sense are businesses, they operate within an intellectual marketplace in which money is not the important currency. They must facilitate the exchange of ideas, or perish. Libraries work to place the materials of scholarship in an arena where access is determined by need. If publishers employ technology to defeat this essentially humanitarian enterprise, the intellectual community will presumably seek to develop alternative models of scholarly communication.