Other+Providers

[|OverDrive]

[|http://www.overdrive.com] OverDrive, Inc., founded in Cleveland in 1986 by Stephen Potash, is the leading provider of digital books for libraries. In addition to offering audio book downloads for checkout, OverDrive has gone into ebooks in a big way, working with Barnes & Noble and Sony to make its product compatible with their readers. That would be great, except that I find the OverDrive product irritating and difficult to use. Perhaps my real issue is with DRM. OverDrive's job is to regulate the use of digital content according to copyright laws and also the circulation rules of an individual library. Check out an ebook? If it is available, you've got it for 2 weeks. (Libraries buy licenses for only a certain amount of ebook "copies," which doesn't solve the issue of not having enough best-sellers on hand to satisfy demand.) At the end of that period, you "return" the ebook, that is, it disappears from your digital device. The navigation of all these restrictions means that the OverDrive experience can be glitchy and unsatisfactory. For example, I checked out an audio file of Uncle Tom's Cabin from my nearby Pasadena Public Library. As I downloaded the new file, OverDrive asked if I wanted to erase the expired files from my hard drive. Sure! Why not? It erased the old files … and the new one too. OverDrive's restrictions were such that I was powerless to download the ebook again or even to "return" it. I had checked it out for 2 weeks and that locked me out of the system. I was more than frustrated; I felt furious. My son needed to listen to that book for school and now we couldn't get it. We ended up downloading the audio from a free service, LibriVox, which posts files of public domain works read by volunteers. The reading was amateurish and the pronunciations spotty, but it did the job. My boy got an A on his paper. Librarians who work with OverDrive complain that they spend lots of time troubleshooting rights issues like mine. Still, our patrons want to borrow ebooks and audio books. The savviest among them will figure out how to make OverDrive work for them. OverDrive's ebook files work with Kobo, Sony, and NOOK e-readers. Many files also work on iPad and other Apple devices. None of them work on the proprietary Amazon Kindle.

[|NetLibrary]

[|http://www.netlibrary.com] EBSCO bought Boulder, Colo.-based NetLibrary from OCLC in the spring of 2010. Like OverDrive, NetLibrary offers ebook and audiobooks for library checkout. Its files are compatible with Kobo, Sony, and NOOK e-readers and often on Apple products. The files will not work on Kindle. Whereas OverDrive seems oriented toward the public library, NetLibrary focuses on corporate and academic works. It features the ability of administrators to create bundles of readings like those assembled for survey classes in college. It also markets subject sets (medical, engineering, computer science) that would work well in a university library environment.

[|ebrary]

[|http://www.ebrary.com] The third company that offers ebooks for checkout from the library is Palo Alto, Calif.'s ebrary, which was recently purchased by ProQuest. ebrary doesn't download book files to a hardware device. Instead, it offers access to its data over the web via its software. Because of this delivery model, which is similar to Amazon's Kindle, ebrary can offer multiple patron access to its titles. This eliminates the issue of restricting library checkouts to one ebook at a time. It could also allow libraries to more vigorously market their ebook services by eliminating the "fear of success" occurrence in which too many customers come after promoted books. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 0.8em; text-align: justify;">This should be glorious news for public libraries. Unfortunately, ebrary has a couple of problems that may make it somewhat impractical for public library use. Access ebrary content. The major problem so far (early days for ProQuest changes) is ebrary's book selection, which seems heavily oriented to nonfiction academic titles. Where are the best sellers that our patrons demand that would put to practical use the ability to supply multiple downloads? Second and probably a minor difficulty, its books only display through web browsers. There are no specific e-reader devices that run ebrary content. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 0.8em; text-align: justify;">Still, ebrary is onto something with its unlimited, multiple access model. This is a library ebook supplier to watch.