Two private equity firms own your library

I drew the library-tech ownership stack on one page last week. The notebook took me three sessions, a primary-check audit, and a couple of admissions that I had been overstating things. The compressed version is shorter than you'd think.

Two firms run most of it. KKR and Francisco Partners.

The DC Council just passed a bill that would meaningfully limit what those firms can charge libraries. Vote was 13-0, unanimous, on May 5, 2026. Mayor Muriel Bowser signed it on May 28, 2026, making DC the second jurisdiction in the country with such a law, a year after Connecticut (pending the standard congressional review period). A veto would have failed anyway: a 13-0 council overrides easily, and Bowser is in the last seven months of her term, not seeking re-election.

But the bill has a trigger. It stays dormant in DC until ten states with a combined 50 million population pass similar legislation (DC itself doesn't count toward the ten). Connecticut already has one; Rhode Island enacted its own in June 2026; Maryland's similar law was struck in 2022 on copyright-preemption grounds; New York's was vetoed for the same reason; Massachusetts and New Jersey are next on the watch list. The binding constraint isn't Bowser's signature. It's whether your state legislature picks up the template.

If you're a librarian outside DC, you should know what's in it. If you're in DC, you already do. If you're a library board member anywhere, the answer to "is private equity my landlord?" turned out to be yes for most of the stack.

Here's the picture.

KKR: the publisher and the platform

KKR closed on OverDrive in June 2020 for ~$775M from Rakuten (terms never officially disclosed). Three years later it bought Simon & Schuster for $1.62B from Paramount Global, announced August 2023 and closed that October. Same sponsor: KKR. Two funds, one firm: Americas Fund XII bought OverDrive, North America Fund XIII bought Simon & Schuster. The vehicles differ; the owner doesn't.

Every time a library buys a Simon & Schuster ebook through OverDrive, two margin streams flow to the same firm. The publisher margin (whatever S&S retains on the library license) and the platform fee (OverDrive's cut on every transaction). KKR is on both sides of the desk.

This is the same vertical integration the DOJ blocked at the Penguin Random House + Simon & Schuster deal in 2022. KKR closed it via financial-sponsor ownership a year later. The antitrust tool worked at the publisher level. It was not applied to the sponsor level. The result was the same.

The cleanest piece of governance evidence I found in this whole investigation: Sari Feldman joined OverDrive's board on July 15, 2020, one month after KKR closed. Past ALA president. Past PLA president. Past Cuyahoga County Public Library executive director. At the time of her appointment, she was serving as a Policy Fellow at the ALA Public Policy and Advocacy Unit. The library establishment is on the board of a KKR-owned vendor. This is normal in PE-rolled verticals. It just isn't usually named in library trade press.

Francisco Partners: the K-12 stack

FP acquired Follett School Solutions in September 2021. Split it into two LLCs: Follett School Solutions LLC (Destiny ILS, Aspen SIS) and Follett Content Solutions LLC (Titlewave). One ownership, two operating entities, structured so the content side could ink deals the catalog side wasn't party to.

That structure paid off in December 2025. FP's Follett Content ceded K-12 digital delivery to KKR's Sora, which is OverDrive's school product. Two separate PE firms commercially welded across portfolios. No shared directors. No coordination required: the structure does the work.

In the same eighteen months, both firms shipped AI features into their products. Destiny AI (built by Tribe AI on Anthropic Claude). OverDrive's Inspire Me generative recommender in Libby. AI-narrated audiobooks entering the OverDrive catalog through PublishDrive. Marshall Breeding's 2026 Library Perceptions Report, which dropped this week, has the demand-side data: zero libraries mentioned interest in AI technologies in respondent comments. The vendors shipped it anyway.

Building on Breeding

Marshall Breeding's 2026 reports just landed, and the data confirms the structural pattern in his own words and his respondents':

Clarivate consolidation is in his headline numbers. 35% of his 2,220 surveyed respondents are on a Clarivate product (Alma, Sierra, Polaris, legacy ProQuest holdings). One publicly traded co accounts for a third of the surveyed installed base.

Post-acquisition pain is documented in respondent quotes. On SirsiDynix under Harris/Constellation (acquired December 2024): "Recent acquisition of SirsiDynix by Harris Corporation has lead to some issues regarding price increases, customer service issues during contract renewal, and the loss of some long time SirsiDynix employees." Another respondent reports a decline in support response time, with most development halted except the "BlueCloud" suite. These are librarians, not analysts.

"Lack of compelling alternatives" is Breeding's own framing for why public-library migration is declining. From 29.3% shopping in 2008 down to 9.2% in 2025. Not from satisfaction. From resignation.

Breeding's data shows the pattern. The financial structure behind the pattern is what this post is about.

The squeeze, with the receipt

DCPL spends $1.6 million on e-books in 2024. That is 34% of its entire collections budget. 54% of DCPL's total circulation is now digital: 3.74 million items annually. Average patron wait time for an ebook hold: 46 days.

One library license for David Szalay's Flesh: $59.99. Retail consumer price: $28.99. Library ebook licenses like this expire on a timer or a checkout cap, depending on the model: two years, or 26 checkouts. So DCPL pays roughly twice what an Amazon customer pays, for one license that expires.

This is the metered licensing model. It is seven years old in its current Big Five form. Penguin Random House moving from perpetual access to metered, in October 2018, was the inflection point. Most current library directors started their careers in the perpetual-access era. The metered era is going to outlive the institutional memory of any other arrangement, unless something interrupts it.

Frumin (the DC Councilmember who introduced B26-0490): "Libraries have no leverage to negotiate in a meaningful way. This is all intended to create leverage."

Reyes-Gavilan (DCPL Executive Director, on the pricing): "The demand is so great that the price we're paying is not sustainable."

Frumin is the same councilmember who reversed Mayor Bowser's FY26 budget proposal that would have cut DCPL branch operating hours from 61 per week to 52, and cut new book acquisitions. He found $6.5 million to restore both. The library-pricing bill is the next round of an ongoing relationship: when the Mayor cut, Frumin restored; when patrons need leverage against publishers, Frumin wrote the law. The 13-0 vote on May 5 was every other DC councilmember signing on.

The bill's mechanism: prohibit DCPL from agreeing to terms that charge more than retail or impose restrictive conditions. Trigger clause: takes effect when 10 jurisdictions with a combined 50 million population pass similar measures. The trigger isn't a poison pill. It is a coalition-formation device. No single state takes the publisher boycott risk alone.

Connecticut already passed comparable legislation. Variations are being debated in New Jersey and Massachusetts. Maryland's earlier law was struck in 2022 because it tried to override copyright. New York's was vetoed by Governor Hochul in 2021 on the same preemption grounds. B26-0490 is structured differently: it regulates the library's contracting authority, not the publisher's copyright. That's the legal trick that might survive preemption. The lawyers who wrote it learned from Maryland and New York.

The forty-year compression

Between January 2022 and December 2025, the library lost: Maryland's reasonable-terms law (struck), Controlled Digital Lending as a model (Hachette v Internet Archive, decision plus 2nd Circuit affirmation; Internet Archive declined to seek Supreme Court review), Baker & Taylor as an ebook-lending competitor to OverDrive (collapsed late 2025), and the federal library measurement instrument (IMLS, nearly eliminated by EO 14238 in March 2025; restored by court order in November 2025).

In the same 48 months, the consolidation: Clarivate closed ProQuest ($5.3B). FP closed Follett. KKR closed Simon & Schuster. Vivendi/Bolloré closed Lagardère (Hachette's parent). Harris/Constellation closed SirsiDynix from ICV (December 2024). FP's Follett Content welded to KKR's Sora (December 2025).

Two patterns ran in parallel. The closures and the consolidations are not coordinated: different actors, different motives, different lawyers. They line up because the financialized library faces structural pressure on every alternative path at the same time. Trade press is built to track the consolidations vendor by vendor. Nobody is built to track them as a pattern.

That's what the notebook does. The map is on the blog if you want the full version.

Monday-morning actions, this Monday

The binding work right now is coalition-building, not advocacy. DC's bill already has the legal structure right (the lawyers learned from Maryland and New York's preemption failures). The legal-strategy work is done. The ten-state trigger does nothing until it fires, and it won't fire without eight more states.

Massachusetts and New Jersey are the next dominoes. Connecticut and Rhode Island are already in. That leaves eight more states to clear the ten-state, 50-million-population threshold. The relevant question for your state library association is whether the DC template is on the legislative agenda yet. If it isn't, that's the ask.

For your vendor conversations, the trigger math is the leverage. Ask your director what percentage of the collections budget goes to ebooks. Ask what happens to license fees on titles whose 26-checkout cap has expired. Ask whether your state has introduced a bill like DC B26-0490 and what your vendor says will happen to availability if it passes. Get that last one in writing.

The Sari Feldman appointment is structural. The December 2025 weld is structural.

None of this is conspiracy. It's just a stack that got built, vendor by vendor, while the trade press tracked one deal at a time. The map is what changes when you draw it all on one page. The 13-0 vote in DC is the first to do that. The next nine states are the ones who finish the picture.

Sources: vendor ownership from librarytechnology.org. Breeding 2026 data from librarytechnology.org/PerceptionsReport. Sari Feldman appointment and ALA role confirmed from OverDrive press release 2020-07-15 (company.overdrive.com) and PR Newswire; the ALA Policy Fellow role is as stated in that press release and may not reflect her current position. DCPL pricing, budget figures, circulation %, wait time, and Reyes-Gavilan / Frumin quotes from The 51st DC news coverage. B26-0490 trigger wording and 13-0 council vote confirmed via LegiScan. Bowser FY26 library-cut history and Frumin reversal from WJLA + DC council records. New York Hochul veto context from Publishers Weekly Dec 2021. If you find an error, tell me. I retracted four reach claims from the working notebook getting here. The discipline is verification before pitching.