In Internet time, I’m extremely late to report it, but awesomeness has occurred. The Douglas County Library System in Colorado, which has been working with alternatives to the licensing of ebooks  from publishers (also called purchasing them outright from publishers). And this week DCL signed a contract (called the Common Understanding) with Smashwords, in which they purchased 10,000 books outright. Califa, a library consortium in California, which has also been exploring alternatives to licensing ebooks through OverDrive, is expected to follow suit. Read Peter Brantley’s piece on this at PWxyz, where he does an excellent and thorough job of going over the whole thing. Hopefully other publishers are paying attention!