Texas: Librarians Fight to Keep Publishers From Taking Over E-Book Revolution

From The Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

There’s a tightrope across the digital divide that nearly 7,000 librarians meeting this week in Fort Worth are crossing, but some aren’t tiptoeing. They’re leaping across the gap and looking for ways to stay at the forefront of a new age in reading.
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Some librarians aren’t willing to let publishers control the revolution.
They are looking to compete by forming their own publishing arms to capitalize on new content streams that have blossomed alongside the e-book tsunami, said Jamie LaRue, director of the Douglas County Library system in Colorado and one of the speakers today at the 100th annual meeting of the Texas Library Association being held at the Fort Worth Convention Center.
“I’m kind of wandering around as an evangelist saying we have two choices: Either we can be marginalized by people trying to lock us out of the market or we can say we don’t want to hang out on the fringe of the revolution, we want to be at the heart of it,” said LaRue, whose library is the first in the nation to create its own e-book management system.
“I think the real trend is the rise of libraries as publishers,” he said “Look at it like this, there are more public libraries in the United States than there are McDonalds. We have a nationwide distribution system.”

Read the Complete Article (Includes Additional Comments from Jamie LaRue)
See Also: What’s the Problem with Self-Publishing? (By Josh Hardo, Library Journal)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Libraries, Management and Leadership, News, Public Libraries, Publishing