Quote:
Originally Posted by disconnected
If I remember correctly, the Kansas state library system was a very early Overdrive adopter and their contract specified that if they were to not renew they would keep all the books they had purchased. I think there was also some vague mention of Overdrive helping Kansas with the transition. (This was before some books had limits of time or number of loans).
When the contract came up for renewal, Overdrive had raised their fees by some order of magnitude, and the clause about Kansas being able to keep books after the relationship ended had not made it into the new contract. Those two things led Kansas to not renew.
Because of the wording of the original contract I think Kansas was able to retain all of their books but I don't know if library systems that signed newer contracts had that option.
There were a lot of news articles about it at the time but it was a while back so I may not be remembering it all correctly.
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I believe you are right in that some early contracts were a purchase once, keep books. Smashwords does have some library systems that work this way when libraries purchase books from Smash. I believe at least two of the library systems work in this manner--even if I pull my books from Smash for some reason, those books remain available at the libraries that purchased them. Overdrive is not one of the participating systems. I think it might be Baker and Axis, but I'd have to go look at the spreadsheet (and will if anyone cares to know.)