Group items tagged

Interesting news from Overdrive.

A heartening story about how the libraries of Douglas County, CO are bucking the current trend of leasing music from services like OverDrive.  As a result, they negotiate directly with publishers, actually own their electronic books, and are able to display said electronic books directly in their catalog, not just in a ebook-only ghetto (a source of irritation to me).  The author suggests this could start a new trend that might culminate in a loosely-organized, nation-wide system that allows smaller libraries to benefit from the expertise and work from larger systems with more resources, like Douglas County.

An outsider view of how Overdrive presents itself as a corporate entity to those not in the library profession, and apparent plans to expand into the school library market.

Ok. I am seriously tired of the popular fiction/non-fiction side of ebooks. Basically Penguin is saying that they will grant libraries access to their ebooks in the way that will tick off your patrons the most, so that they will never want to use your service. Why does 3M say ok to this? Because Penguin dropped OverDrive earlier this year and this is a new way to entice people to their 3M Cloud Library product. Does MOBIUS really want to work with a company that will accept less?

Move over OverDrive here comes 3M. Here is my favorite quote : "They're (patrons) able to do it (download books) on their own. [3M] is doing something right." This is huge as someone who worked at B&N for 4 years usability is a big deal. B&N is where people came to troubleshoot and the biggest headache was OverDrive (I hear its easier now). Also it'll be nice having someone else in the e-book market for libraries.