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!
Small Publishers: Webcast on Ebook Distribution Available
I don’t have a lot of time to go into it, but Publisher’s Weekly just came out with an article about a recent webcast on ebook distribution for small publishers. Here at MonsterLibrarian.com, we see a lot of requests to review ebooks, requests from small presses, and requests from small presses issuing titles as ebooks. Distribution is a major problem for them, since many don’t have the funds to get their titles listed in wholesalers’ databases. So, if you are a small press dealing with ebooks, or think you might go that direction soon, you might want to check this webcast out. It is available free for one week. Hope that helps you all out!
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