As previously announced, Macmillan officially began lending digital books to libraries Friday with 1200 backlist Minotaur Books titles under a pilot program. Macmillan ebooks will be available in the one copy/one user lending model for the earlier of two years or 52 checkouts for $25 each. Scottish publisher Mainstream will cease publishing new titles by the end of 2013 after more than 35 years in business. Titles already under contract and scheduled for publication will proceed as usual through March 2014, with backlist titles to be reissued under a Random House UK-based imprint. The company’s Edinburgh offices will close on […]
Libraries
Macmillan Library Lending to Start March 1
Macmillan’s initiative to start selling some of their ebooks to libraries, beginning with about 1,200 Minotaur backlist titles, will begin March 1 according to an OverDrive email cited by InfoDocket. Macmillan had said in the January the program would start “before the end of the first quarter.” Per InfoDocket’s earlier second-hand report, the email confirms that “Macmillan ebooks will be available in the one copy/one user lending model for the earlier of two (2) years or 52 checkouts for $25 each.”
Nook Adds Beta Text-to-Speech Feature; Penguin Library eBooks Sold At Consumer Price
Though not an advertised feature, Nook appears to have added text-to-speech “read aloud” capability for all ebooks in its latest releases. The National Federation for the Blind posted about the “beta” feature–which appears as an “accessibility” setting–last week: “We selected enable accessibility (beta) which will actually provide speech to read Nook books. That’s quite momentous, and would be even better if it were documented somewhere we could find it, or if any of the customer service reps knew about it. Still–it’s more than we’ve seen previously.” In August, the California Public Library Authority reached a settlement with the NFB over […]
eNews: Penguin Expands eBook Library Lending Pilot with Baker & Taylor; Sourcebook’s “Put Me In The Story” Children’s Book App
Penguin is expanding its library ebook lending pilot programs through a new distribution agreement with Baker & Taylor that will make their titles available to public libraries in Los Angeles County and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the NYT reports. Penguin tells us they “hope it is up and running before the end of the year.” The new initiative will employ the same lending terms as Penguin’s pilot with 3M and the New York public libraries from earlier this year: Titles are available for library lending six months after publication, sold at standard ebook prices, available for one-lend-at-a-time, with each purchase valid […]
A New Route to Library eBook Lending On the Way
Recorded Books is developing a new flexible library ebook lending platform that recognizes the varying requirements of today’s world: Publishers want to create their own, individual (and often elastic) models for the terms on which they will provide ebooks to libraries, rather than fit into a single model constructed by wholesalers. The Recorded Books model will give publishers title-level control over four key factors: price; limitations over the number of loans per purchase (if any); time limitation of the license (e.g. expires after one-year, etc.; again, if any); and availability of titles. Consultant Mike Shatzkin is working with Recorded Books […]
Hathi Trust Library Scans Are Judged Fair Use; Court Won’t Address Orphan Works Project Until It Is Resumed
With the recent settlement between Google and US publishers apparently not touching libraries at all (to the extent the parties have revealed anything), the companion suit by the Authors Guild and a number of other organzations against the Hathi Trust takes on extra interest. (Hathi is a digital repository for Google’s scans from many of the US academic libraries, with a strict set of limits, processes and procedures.) US District Court Judge Harold Baer in New York ruled on Wednesday, supporting the basic claim of the libraries that the Hathi Trust’s use of almost 10 million digital volumes qualifies as […]