[Bookworm_Girl]

I found out more information on the other city that dropped out of the consortium. They wanted to control their own purchases rather than competing in the consortium. Their residents downloaded 50,000 ebooks annually from the consortium compared to 36,000 for my city. Their process is more transparent. They tell you how many companies competed, what their evaluation criteria and score was, what the different proposal costs were, etc. They decided to select two companies with three-year contracts. What's fascinating is that it says Overdrive will be the primary contractor during Year 1 (2014) and possibly Year 2 due to the timing of the Baker and Taylor new software platform currently in beta testing. Sounds like that city plans to switch to a different, non-Overdrive primary system in the future too!

EDIT: That city currently has about 5,000 ebooks in their independent Overdrive library compared to 70,000 in the consortium and 3,500 in my city's new 3M catalog.