[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Synamon

I found some FAQs on the beta being used by the Kansas State Library, it's very early days for this system.

That was interesting. From the FAQ:

The platform fee for the old company was scheduled to increase by 700% over the next 3 years. The Kansas library community would have been unable to continue purchasing enough new downloadable books to keep up with demand. Because of this we have changed companies. The new downloadable services will be provided by One Click Digital (Recorded Books) for audiobooks and by 3M Cloud Library for ebooks.

Clicking on the "Open Letter" confirms that the old company was Overdrive:

The proposed new contract included:

•substantial subscription charges to individual libraries in the consortium;

•a 700% increase from 2010 to 2013 for the Digital Library Reserve Server
Application Service (platform) fee; and

•removal of language (11.4) that acknowledged consortium ownership of
material. . . .

The State Library (acting on behalf of the Consortium) was also required to obtain permission from each of the 163 publishers of purchased audio and ebook content so that the content could be moved to a new platform vendor. As of today, the State Library has received 88 publisher permission forms and has permission to move the content of 3804 audio and 875 ebooks to the new providers.

This would seem to be a pitifully small number of titles, even if only a portion of what they will have on the 3M platform. Also, their description of the 3M beta problems sounds above the norm. As a professional programmer, I can understand performance problems when you start getting large numbers of simultaneous users. But this sounds lame, even for a beta test:

3M did not want to overload the new system, so only 2 librarians at a time have had access to the shopping interface. They have purchased around 150 books in less than 2 weeks.

I theory, I like the 3M model on grounds of it being so inconvenient that publishers won't see it as a threat. In practice, I hope my libraries can afford to keep with Overdrive.