Two pieces of news today…
1. Check out Sue Polanka’s post at No Shelf Required:
39% of U.S. Public Libraries without e-books
February 7th, 2012
“I [Sue Polanka] missed this report when it was released back in December, 2011 by COSLA, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies. According to a survey of state libraries from the summer of 2011, 39% of public libraries reported offering no downloadable media service – no ebooks, no audiobooks, and no videos.
Here is more from the press release:
The Chief Officers of State Library agencies recently surveyed their membership to determine the extent to which U.S. public libraries are offering downloadable ebooks, audiobooks and videos for use on portable devices like e-readers and smartphones.
The results of the survey, conducted this summer, showed that 39% of public libraries in the U.S. had not yet begun to offer downloadable media service to their communities, a matter of great concern to state librarians.
The 39% of public libraries not yet offering downloadable media serve about 16% of the US population served by libraries.
While the COSLA survey did not attempt to discover the characteristics of the libraries lagging behind in offering downloadable media, the COSLA E-Book Task Force believes that most are small and rural public libraries with small budgets. COSLA has adopted a goal for all U.S. public libraries to offer ebooks and other downloadable media by 2015 at the latest.
Library Journal also has a nice article on the COSLA survey.”
2. Check out the good news from Random House, one of the Big 6 fiction publishers:
Random House makes history, says it will sell books to libraries with no restriction on number of loans
by Dennis Johnson
“It’s one of those modern situations that no one in publishing ever imagined: Being at odds with librarians, the ultimate champions of literacy and literature. But that’s been the situation as publishers have tried to figure out how, exactly, to handle selling ebooks to libraries. I mean, the situation has always been perfectly straightforward: You sold a library a book and, when their patrons wore it out, you sold them another one. But no one foresaw books that wouldn’t wear out. How in the world do you price such a thing?”
The current state of the Big 6 (Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, Simon & Shuster, and Macmillan). Read the article and warch for new developments.
New players in publishing are in other interesting tactics as Amazon and B&N enter publishing, Borders exits completely, B&N and Chapters Indigo refuse to retail Amazon titles, and Overdrive continues to aggregate and negotiate. Other developments from Ingram and Baker & Taylor are interesting too. It’s a wild ride for everyone – publishers, retailers, vendors and libraries. And this is just the popular stuff.
Stephen
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