The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books

  • 📰 NewYorker
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 44 sec. here
  • 2 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 21%
  • Publisher: 67%

Business News News

Business Business Latest News,Business Business Headlines

Why the economics of digital-book lending may not be sustainable for libraries without significant changes.

In the first days of the lockdown, the N.Y.P.L. experienced a spike in downloads, which lengthened the wait times for popular books. In response, it limited readers to three checkouts and three waitlist requests at a time, and it shifted almost all of its multimillion-dollar acquisitions budget to digital content. By the end of March, seventy-four per cent of U.S. libraries were reporting that they had expanded their digital offerings in response to coronavirus-related library closures.

In the two-thousands, OverDrive helped publishers set up online stores and sold e-books directly to consumers through its own marketplace. The company also persuaded a few presses to license their e-books to libraries. At the time, the six largest publishers tended to sell their goods through online retailers, such as Amazon, which released its e-reader, the Kindle, in 2007. But, gradually, the Big Six began to sell digital rights to libraries under a “one copy, one user” model.

Libraries now pay OverDrive and its peers for a wide range of digital services, from negotiating prices with publishers to managing an increasingly complex system of digital rights. During our video call, Potash showed me OverDrive’s e-book marketplace for librarians, which can sort titles by price, popularity, release date, language, topic, license type, and more.

 

Thank you for your comment. Your comment will be published after being reviewed.
Please try again later.

'The point of a library is to preserve': that's not how public libraries see their primary mission. They 'weed' books continually because of space constraints. And paper books generally too beat up to circ after 20-25 checkouts.

Rate my naked photos)😘😘😘

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

 /  🏆 90. in BUSİNESS

Business Business Latest News, Business Business Headlines