Quote:
Originally Posted by dkperez
Has there been any SIGNIFICANT movement from the publishers to get current, best-selling books that people actually want to read into the hands of libraries? At reasonable rates and WITHOUT ridiculous usage limitations?
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It seems to me that reading this year's books is a luxury. I don't see a big freedom to read issue with less affluent readers having to wait 6-12 months, especially if there is an option to read a paper library copy a bit sooner. If I have to wait a year so that the team creating the book can get more income, I welcome that.
Someone may say that the bestselling authors you mention already make enough money. But I'm not sure that James Patterson's ghostwriters do. And revenue from these best-sellers subsidize many of the research-heavy titles that sell less well despite taking more work to create.
The number of books in most Overdrive collections continues to increase. I am finding a little more than half of what I want to read this way. Next month, the whole Penguin eBook catalog, aside from releases in the last six months, is scheduled to become available in New York City, via the 3M Cloud system. This means that everyone in New York State, who can visit the city once, will have them available. As you define SIGNIFICANT, that isn't, but it is significant to me.
I would be more inclined to agree with you if you distinguished between publishers that generally make their eBooks available to public libraries (most of them) and those who do not (Simon & Schuster, MacMillan, Hachette, Amazon).