The Digital Reader

The news this morning that Smashwords had sold $40,000 worth of ebooks to Douglas County Libraries reminded me about another story I wanted to pursue.

Some months back Douglas County Libraries took up the task of tracking which ebooks can’t be bought by libraries. They started by taking a recent best seller (USA Today, Amazon, etc) and then checking the prices and availability via library book distributors Ingram and B&T, ebook distributors 3M and Overdrive, and Amazon, B&N, and Bilbary.
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The Iowa Center for the Book has discovered a way to get Simon & Schuster to overcome their usual intransigence to library ebooks.

It is unfortunately not a trick which can be repeated on a large scale, but so long as you jut want S&S to give in and distribute a single ebook title to libraries then I have something you can use.

Every year the ICB chooses a single excellent book to promote as part of the library program All Iowa Reads. The title for the coming year, The Year We Left Home, is published by Simon & Schuster.

It’s not available to libraries as an ebook.
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It’s long been known that Penguin never really liked the idea of library ebooks, and as of yesterday I think they made it clear that they dislike library ebooks on the Kindle even more. The NYTimes Media Decoder blog reported yesterday that Penguin has signed a distribution deal with Baker & Taylor to bring Penguin’s ebooks to B&T’s Axis 360 library ebook platform.

The terms of the deal are pretty much the same as the details that Penguin and 3M Cloud Library disclosed last week. The ebooks are available at retail price points  under expiring one year licenses.
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Every time I write about library ebooks lately the news seems to be bad. If one major publisher isn’t raising prices then another is cutting back on the number of titles offered.

But in spite of the litany of bad news, it wasn’t until I saw a particular PDF yesterday that I was reminded just how limited the selection of fiction ebooks really were.

I came across a PDF yesterday which I would like to share with you. It was put together by someone with Douglas County Libraries, and it shows just how many ebooks which the library cannot buy.
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When it comes to ebooks device and apps support still rules the market, and that’s what B&T showed us with today’s news. It may have taken Baker & Taylor 6 months longer than they had initially planned, but Axis 360, the library ebook platform which was launched last fall, now supports Epub.

The press release just came out this morning, but aside from boasting about how library patrons can read Epub and PDF on Nook, Kobo, and Sony it does not say much.
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