Our title for today's topic was heard at a recent meeting of librarians in Western Massachusetts - Ebooks = A Mess. Sorting it out will take some time but we'll begin here with the "big six" publishing houses - Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House and Simon & Schuster. Until recently, Penguin sold ebooks to libraries through OverDrive (the major distributor of ebooks to the library market) but recently stopped sales to the library market and they put restrictions on Kindle titles already purchased. Random House is in, and will make all of its titles available to the library market. Harper Collins allows only 26 circulations to its library ebooks. For this reason, our consortium, CWMARS, is not purchasing ebook titles by Harper Collins for the foreseeable future. American Library Association President, Molly Raphael wrote "As of early March, the other three publishers - Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster - were still not permitting access for libraries to their digital editions." (americanlibrariesmagazine.org, March/April 2012 page 4) So who is? It looks like Random House is the winner here. In the same issue of American Libraries, Raphael wrote that some publishers think "that libraries lend ebooks to anyone who visits their websites, thus making collections available virtually without restrictions worldwide" (page 12). Not!
While looking up information for this paragraph I came across an Overdrive "cheat sheet" which is now available at the circulation desk here at Tilton Library. It's called "Library Compatible eBook Devices" and is current as of March 1, 2012. We also have "how-to" brochures available which provide step-by-step instructions for checking out ebooks and audiobooks to different devices. /sw
