[Eril-l] Question: Are e-books capitalized expenses?

[Dennis W. Flanders]

Hi all,

I am helping our accounting department to explore the possibility of capitalizing e-book expenditures like we do with physical books.  Does anyone have any experience with this, or otherwise have some insight to share?  It would be much appreciated!

For the moment, we are only looking at purchased content, not subscriptions.   Part of what I'm reviewing is whether, for a given publisher/vendor, purchased titles need to live on the publisher/vendor platform for DRM reasons and/or to manage finite simultaneous users. I'm also curious whether the existence of recurring maintenance/access fees might influence whether purchased e-books are capitalized or uncapitalized.   Finally, I'm wondering whether we'd be able to consider some e-books capitalized expenses and other e-books uncapitalized expenses depending on these variables, e.g. Oxford Handbooks may be capitalized but purchased titles on Proquest Ebook Central should not be.

Thanks for your thoughts!
Dennis

Dennis Flanders
Electronic Resources Librarian
Sawyer Library, Suffolk University
617.973.1120

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