Hello,
Just wanted to share my experience of successfully donating an ebook to my local library. I'm not going to give any specifics like location, names, emails etc, as I didn't get a permission to do that and the process was very manual, therefore laborious, for the library staff. If they suddenly received a large volume of those requests (it would be great if they automated it) it might be problematic for them.
I thought I'd give it a try for 2 reasons: I check out ebooks from my local library quite frequently and I thought that instead of buying an ebook for myself (which I'd probably read only once), I should be able to buy the ebook for the library and check it out from the library whenever I want, but additionally library would share it with others. Meaning i should have the right to donate the written word in electronic form just as I do with paper form to my local library. (Hopefully one day we'll be able to do with ebooks all the things that we do with paper books today).
The library needs to be overdrive.com based - meaning your library should be on the list of libraries if you go to
http://search.overdrive.com
First I located a book I wanted to check out via
http://search.overdrive.com . The search result told me that it was available in other libraries, but not in my local library. On the bottom of the search page, there's "Contact us" link. I wrote Overdrive an email that I would like to donate this particular ebook to my local library. Overdrive forwarded my request to the contact at my local library. The contact person ordered the book and said I should expect an invoice from Overdrive. I got the invoice one day later and I could pay for it either by faxing (or sending a pdf) a credit card charge authorization, or mailing them a check. Same day the book appeared in
http://search.overdrive.com as available in my local library and I was able to check it out.
The price of this particular book was actually twice as expensive compared to what it would cost me at bn.com (around $10 difference), but from what I gather it's not always the case. To find out how much would it cost you to donate a book, I would locate the book via
http://search.overdrive.com/retail/ and look up what it says under SRP for that book. That should be the most you will have to pay for the book (Overdrive gave 20% from SRP for the book I donated, probably my library's discount). For other books I looked at, it seems they are about $1-$2 more expensive to donate via overdrive than to buy via bn.com (Example: Crichton "Lost World" ePub SRP 10.62 USD (minus library discount), bn.com ePub price $6.39)
And that's it.
I searched for similar topics before I posted it and it looks like nobody tried that before and some people said that it's not possible. Hopefully this is useful for other people with the same mindset as mine. I would encourage everyone with library access to consider donating an ebook rather than purchasing it for yourself (you cannot donate the ebook later on and most of the ebooks probably collect electronic dust inside your ereader now, so something to think about).
spec