This morning, National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” took a look at libraries and ebooks. As the story notes, libraries are seeing increasing demands for ebooks, but are facing challenges in securing content for lending. No transcript available yet, but it is a short (a bit under four minutes) listen.
From Queens Library’s CEO Tom Gallante: “When you license content through [OverDrive] you really aren’t owning the content. Every year you have to pay [OverDrive] to continue to have that subscription service or you lose your content that you already paid for.” More importantly, Queens needs to check in over 70,000 books a day (and check out the same number); when the information is digital, there are fewer additional costs to circulating materials.
DCWG Cochair Bob Wolven also is quoted: “These are questions that go beyond what we are doing now—we want to avoid developing the model for next year that’s going to be obsolete by the time anyone gets to put it in place.”
But, as the story concludes, these are the questions that we need to answer as people keep lining up to download ebooks from their library.