The Friction Tax

The Library Insights Summit is one of the better rooms in this industry. Foreword Reviews has run it for four years as a place where publishers and librarians can talk more honestly than they can on a trade show floor. This year's recap, by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez at Words & Money, had a line I expect to keep quoting.

Barbara Fitzgerald manages collection services at Oak Park Public Library. She named something she calls the friction tax: the harder a book is to buy, the less likely a library buys it, unless readers ask loud enough to force the issue. Small publishers pay this tax the most, because they don't have the vendor relationships or the spot in automated ordering tools that big publishers get by default.

Most people picture library buying as a librarian surveying every book ever published and choosing the best ones. It hasn't worked that way in decades.

How the shelf gets built before you ever see it

A librarian picks books off a shelf someone else already stocked. Ordering platforms, digital marketplaces, release plans, ready-made lists, and the catalog records that make a book findable at all: a small number of vendors build and run every piece of that shelf.

A book already in the system is a click away. A book that isn't takes real work, and a librarian running a department on four hours a week of ordering time doesn't have real work to spare.

That's not laziness. It's math. Fitzgerald's friction tax is that math said out loud: the system decides what gets bought, and it only holds what the vendors put in it. Demand can push a book past the friction, but a book readers never saw is a book they can't ask for. The tax collects itself.

The advice in the room

The summit's advice for small publishers was solid, and it went about as far as advice can go while leaving the shelf exactly where it is. Fix your metadata. Allison Belan, incoming head of the Book Industry Study Group, put it well: if you don't take care of your metadata, your metadata will take care of you. Build vendor relationships. Learn the supply chain. Find the gaps the majors miss.

All true, and all of it is advice for traveling the same road better, given by people whose jobs depend on that road running smoothly: a standards body, a cataloging cooperative, trade groups, a review magazine that only means something inside the current system.

None of that makes the advice wrong. It just means nobody on that stage was in a position to ask whether the road itself was the problem, the same way your mechanic isn't the one who tells you to move somewhere you can walk to work.

The diagnosis says more than the advice does

Belan, in the same recap, named the real problem: a supply chain built for a handful of publishers now has to carry 3.5 million new independent titles a year.

A bridge built for a handful of trucks is carrying millions of them, and the room's answer was mostly about how each truck should pack its load. The size of that mismatch got said out loud, in the industry's own venue. What didn't get said: if the friction tax exists because a small number of vendors decide what's discoverable, the fix for the books that pipeline wasn't built for might be a different road, not a better packing job.

What a different road looks like

Not a metaphor. I've built some of this and sketched the rest.

One piece is a lending platform where libraries and independent authors and small presses deal with each other directly, no marketplace, no selection tool, no license terms decided in a room the library was never in. I run one. It's called MetisLib, and a real public library's patrons check out real books through it right now.

Another is copy cataloging without a subscription fee, because metadata is the most expensive stretch of the current road, and a small library shouldn't have to pay rent on the ability to describe its own books. I'm building that one too.

A third is only a sketch: an agent that watches the platforms authors already use to register and sell their work, since no single public list of small-press and self-published books exists, and hands a library a clean feed of what's new. Same discovery problem MetisLib solves for lending, one step earlier, at the point a book becomes findable at all. Not running yet. Next on the list.

None of this scales to everything, and pretending it would is its own kind of hype. Libraries will need the major houses forever, and the major houses will ride the major road forever.

The real claim is narrower: for the part of publishing that road was never built to carry, a second road costs less than rebuilding the first. The first one is doing its job. It was just never given this one, and that isn't anyone's fault.

What you can do with this

If you're a librarian:

1. Run one direct-buying experiment this quarter. Pick a gap the summit itself named, early teens, older-adult protagonists, simultaneous Spanish and English editions, and buy five titles outside your usual vendor workflow. Time it. That's your friction tax rate, in hours.
2. Count your indie titles. What share of your collection comes from outside the five biggest publishers? If your library system can't answer that in ten minutes, that's an answer too.
3. Ask your vendor what it takes. How does a small press get into the ordering tools you use, and what does it cost them? Informative even when it's a pleasant answer.

If you're a small publisher, fix your metadata. Belan is right, and it's the part of the road you control. But budget a second line for direct channels: co-ops, consortia, platforms that skip the middleman. Better metadata improves your position on the existing road. A second road changes what that position is worth.

Nobody built the friction tax on purpose. It's what happens when a road made for a handful of trucks meets 3.5 million. You're allowed to build another one.

Filed July 2026. No corrections to date.