November 29, 2025

Q&A: Scott Wasinger, EBSCO Publishing’s VP of Sales, Ebooks and Audiobooks

Scott Wasinger, EBSCO Publishing’s VP of Sales, Ebooks and Audiobooks, discusses EBSCO’s new Collection Manager tool, new options for patron driven acquisition, and plans to expand the company’s fiction and audiobook offerings in 2013, as part of a series of Q&As leading up to “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond,” LJ’s third annual ebook summit on Wednesday, October 17.

Q&A: Steve Potash, President and CEO of OverDrive On New APIs, OverDrive Read, WIN Catalog and More

Steve Potash, OverDrive President and CEO, discusses several new developments at the company, including new APIs to simplify ebook integration, the new OverDrive Read browser-based ereader, and the company’s new WIN catalog, as part of a series of Q&As leading up to “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond,” LJ’s third annual ebook summit on Wednesday, October 17.

Q&A: Follett Library Resources Director of Digital Products John A. Williams on Ebooks in preK-12

John A. Williams, director of digital products for Follett Library Resources, discusses the growing role that ebooks are playing in preK-12 education as part of a series of Q&As leading up to “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond,” LJ’s third annual ebook summit on Wednesday, October 17.

Stakeholders Strive to Define Standards for Web-Scale Discovery Systems

There is great hope that these rapidly maturing discovery products will not only promote information literacy strategies but also deliver what metasearch (or federated search) has failed to achieve—a Google-like interface that provides a fast, single point of entry to an institution’s relevant and vetted scholarly content. However, at the moment, even as libraries are struggling to reestablish themselves as a compelling place to start research, the three constituencies—libraries, content providers, and discovery service vendors—cannot even agree on a common vocabulary to describe what they do.

Q&A: Ingram Library Services VP Rich Rosy on E-Content Management

Rich Rosy, vice president and general manager of Ingram Library Services, discusses the distributor’s views on e-content management as part of a series of Q&As leading up to “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond,” LJ’s third annual ebook summit on Wednesday, October 17.

Safari Books Online Seeks to Simplify Tech Collections

Begun back in 2001 by O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, Safari Books Online was something of a pioneer. It now contains some 25,000 ebook and video titles from more than 75 publishers, with new publishers added regularly. Its main strength is its specificity: rather than try to cover every possible subject, Safari Books Online concentrates largely on technology, business, and especially programming, on a subscription basis.

Penguin Ebook Pilot Test Expands Beyond NYC

The 3M Cloud Library, the New York Public Library (NYPL), the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), and publisher Penguin Books have officially launched a pilot program that will allow patrons of the two systems to check out a selection of Penguin ebook titles six months after initial publication. NYPL will also offer additional titles from the 3M cloud library, the company said in an announcement today.

Macmillan Confirms Ebook Pilot for Libraries

Macmillan is working on a pilot project that will test lending of its ebook titles at libraries, the publisher confirmed in a statement to Publisher’s Weekly today. Details of the project remained undisclosed. “We have been working hard to develop an e-book lending model that works for all parties, as we value the libraries and the role they play in the reading community,” MacMillan wrote PW in a prepared statement. “We are currently finalizing the details of our pilot program and will be announcing it when we are ready, and not in reaction to a demand.”

ALA, LaRue Respond to Hachette Price Increase

The American Library Association (ALA) on Friday denounced Hachette Book Group’s decision to implement steep price increases on its back-catalog of ebooks sold to the library market. OverDrive broke the news to its customers in an email on September 13, stating that “Hachette will be raising its eBook prices on October 1, 2012 on their currently available eBook catalog (~3,500 eBook titles with release dates of April 2010 and earlier). On average prices will increase 220 percent.” ALA President Maureen Sullivan expressed disappointment at Hachette’s choice, noting that ALA had believed that the publisher was moving toward more favorable terms for libraries.

First Book Comes Unglued

In June, nicely timed just before the American Library Association’s Annual Conference, Gluejar announced their first “unglued” title: “Oral Literature in Africa”. Well, now it is available for downloading in several different formats: PDF EPUB Kindle Kindle Daisy Full Text DjVu You can also read it online using the Internet Archive’s book reader. It should […]