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LJ’s third annual Ebook third annual ebook summit “The Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks, and Beyond” featured insightful presentations and lively discussions on topics ranging from ebook discovery, how ebooks have affected collection development strategies, the growth of etextbooks, and a post-mortem on the industry’s response to the Research Works Act early this year.
Readers are continuing to experiment with ebooks, and the pace at which they are adopting the format is increasing, according to the forthcoming edition of LJ’s Fall 2012 Patron Profiles survey. The Patron Profiles Fall 2012 report contains detailed data on ebook user demographics, device preference, preferred reading formats, library visitation trends and shifts in onsite use, patron book and ebook acquisition trends, opinions on the possibility of libraries selling ebooks, a section on self-publishing trends, and more.
Skip Dye, vice president, director of library and academic marketing and sales for Random House, discusses the publisher’s views on ebooks in libraries 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.
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.”
The ebook library lending policies of the Big Six publishers garner most of the attention, because public libraries regard access to best-selling titles as a critical service.
However, it may help to scan the landscape not only for the “Big Six” trade publishers but also for the “fairly large” and the “not so big” and the “further afield” in order to get a fuller sense of publishers’ participation in the overall library marketplace.
The list is meant to be a helpful, not comprehensive, resource. The focus is whether or not publishers are in the library ebook marketplace. It is not meant to be a listing of all possible ways to acquire ebooks for a library collection.
