After years of expressing concern about the potential impact that library lending might have on consumer sales, major publishers have good cause to take another look at the library market for ebooks, according to executives from library ebook distributors OverDrive, 3M, and Baker & Taylor. With consumer sales growth slowing, bolstering institutional sales will likely become more of a priority for major publishers. OverDrive CEO Steve Potash noted that publishers, like all for-profit companies, are always looking for growth, and “there’s still a lot a growth in institutions, and there [are] significant opportunities for growth in education…. If retail is flattening, you have to experiment.”
OverDrive’s Big Library Read Boosts Checkouts, Sales
By May 28, 2013
on The Four Corners of the Sky, the 2009 Michael Malone novel promoted during OverDrive’s Big Library Read ebook initiative, was checked out almost 24,000 times from May 15 through May 23, according to preliminary data provided by OverDrive and publisher Sourcebooks. The title’s position on Amazon’s Sales Rank charts also rose dramatically during the promotion’s first nine days, moving up more than 50,000 spots from 67,198 to 16,798.