It’s not cheap for university libraries to maintain an ever-growing collection of print books.

According to the most recent analysis published by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), it costs about $4.26 a year just to keep one book in an open library stack, wrote Donald Barclay, an academic librarian himself, in a recent opinion piece for Newsweek.

The main issue is the expense of storage; the University of Chicago, for example, spent six years and $81 million dollars on the renovation of a library building just to store printed books in the social sciences and humanities in the same building. Three and a half million books had to be moved “underground” so that all the books could peacefully coexist in the same space.

Of course, libraries like to make their books available to their patrons, which is why warehouses, while cheaper, are not the favorable alternative.

Furthermore, according to the CLIR study, book preservation involves more than storage issues; it also involves construction, maintenance, cleaning, electricity, and circulation—all variables whose costs differ based on geographical location.

Academic libraries, therefore, have to think about how to prioritize book storage going forward.

“Chicago’s library project could well represent the end of an era—the era of colleges and universities expending millions of dollars so that printed books can be housed in on-campus libraries,” wrote Barclay.

“While I believe there will always be a place for the book in the hearts of academics, it is far less likely there will be a place for the book, or at least for every book, on the academic campus.”