Tim Coates, founder of ebook company Bilbary, pledged to donate a portion of Bilbary’s proceeds to British libraries, according to The Independent.
Bilbary launched in the U.S. this week, and will go live in Britain next month. Billing itself as an “ebook library”, Bilbary will sell ebooks, but also allow renting and lending for a limited period. According to Publishers Weekly, to facilitate lending through libraries, Bilbary will let publishers set a “borrowing” price less than the sale price and include a time limit (Bilbary will set a 20-day limit as a default).
Some 600 of the U.K.’s 4,000 libraries have closed or are under threat of closure, but it is unclear at this point which libraries will be helped by Bilbary or how much funding is available. “We’ll put in as much as we can,” Coates told The Independent.
Coates announced that U.S. libraries can earn a share of the income from e-book sales made from their websites through Bilbary, for the benefit of the libraries themselves and their patrons. Said Coates, “It is practical in America because state library services have the organization to cope with it. It isn’t practical in the UK because the library service is simply, in our view, not organized at all,” The Bookseller reported. Coates met with U.S. state librarians in February, as LJ reported.
About Meredith Schwartz
A much needed breathe of fresh air: english libraries are being ruined through neglect, ignorance and sometimes sheer malice.
Readers and borrowers deserve better and thanks to Mr Coates will start to have access to hundreds perhaps thousands more than the parlous few which shiver on the shelves at present in many local libraries or have been ‘disposed’ of by their culture guards at Town Halls