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Ebrary’s flagship ebook product is Academic Complete, but the ProQuest unit has also offered for two years a parallel product in the public library channel called Public Library Complete that some libraries are finding a congenial fit as they sort through the growing number of offerings on the market.
Jeff Hastings considers building a Follett ebook collection now that the company has released apps that let patrons read from among their 132,000 K–12 titles, online or off, on iPads and Android 3.0+ tablets.
When EBSCO acquired NetLibrary from OCLC in March 2010, it obtained a fully formed ebook platform that already had a large collection of about 200,000 ebooks from 500 publishers available in 17,000 sites worldwide. The challenge was to smooth out this platform, now known as Ebooks on EBSCOhost, so that it could migrate to the EBSCO interface and there be remade.
COSLA believes that ebooks will be the preferred format for reading materials in the future. As a result, it has set a goal for all U.S. public libraries to offer ebooks and downloadable media by 2015. As a step in that direction, LJ is publishing a series of articles that closely examines the various ebook platforms available, including this environmental scan.
The Freading ebook platform has only been live for about three months, but it is already showing a fairly rapid rate of growth, thanks in part to its low fees and the immediate access it gives libraries to a collection of about 20,000 ebooks on a multi-user, simultaneous basis.
Baker & Taylor is one of the oldest print book distributors, but it only recently entered the ebook market with its own fully fledged digital media platform, Axis 360. Since its launch in June 2011, the platform has gained some traction, with 107 libraries having signed contracts as of March 5 (38 sites are live).
