Eric Hellman Says "3M's eBook Cloud Library Didn't Come Out of Nowhere!"
A new blog post by GlueJar President and the founder of Go To Hellman (one of our favorite blogs), Eric Hellman.
When Douglas County Libraries began investigating how to put ebooks into county resident’s computers, they wanted to do something similar. A user looking for ebooks should be greeted with a virtual bookshelf of books waiting to be checked out. [Douglas Country, CO Library Director Jamie] LaRue was not satisfied with the offering of industry leader Overdrive because he couldn’t do such a simple thing.
Public libraries that offer ebooks are frequently faced with problems posed by the strong demand for ebooks. Their users are frequently disappointed that the ebooks they want are always checked out. Overdrive has not yet implemented an programming interface that would allow library catalogs to check on an ebook’s availability before showing it to a user, so the process of finding an available ebook can involve a lot of tedious clicks.
Read the complete post. It includes mentions of OverDrive WIN and Bibliocommons.
See Also: “Open Access eBooks” by Eric Hellman (via Scribd)
An Unedited Chapter Scheduled to Appear in a Future Issue of Library Technology Report
Hat Tip/Thanks: Open Access Tracking Project
Filed under: Libraries, Open Access, Patrons and Users, Public Libraries, Publishing
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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