I started my final post-lunch round of sessions with this
presentation made by four different ebook vendors:
- Andromeda Yelton from Gluejar
- Ken Breed from EBSCOhost
- Alison Griffin of Ingram Coutts Library Services
- Mike Shontz of Overdrive
With
the exception of Andromeda Yelton's presentation, I was generally
underwhelmed. I was not previously familiar with Gluejar or their
related website http://unglue.it/.
The goal of the company is to negotiate open, permissive licenses
from publishers for books. Andromeda described this mission in an
indirect way by first listing all of the ways that publishers and
libraries currently do not agree on the issue of ebook purchasing and
distribution, and then presented Gluejar as an approach that might
end this strife, at least in some cases. Gluejar currently hasn't
worked out any deals and has not books, so it's in an early stage of
its development.
Ken Breed's presentation for EBSCOhost was energetic and kind of
interesting, but also at times a little confusing as I got
overwhelmed by his drawn-out analogy of ebook distribution models to
roller coasters. His big point about EBSCO and it's current ebook
options is that it's simplified the pricing model by getting rid of
extra fees so when you buy the book you pay a simple price. As a
library with EBSCO ebooks, this hasn't necessarily been all that
great since one of the fees seemed to be the one to allow users to
download books and use them on a device, a feature which disappeared
a few months ago, from what we've been able to tell.
I wasn't particularly interested in Alison Griffin's presentation as
Ingram deals pretty exclusively with academic libraries and the
issues were mainly of interest to academic libraries.
Finally Mike Shonz from Overdrive gave his presentation, which was
mainly interesting for his mentioning some kind of purchase on demand
system they are working on as well as an API which can make it
integrate tighter into existing library systems.
The session, overall, felt like it was 75% sales pitch, which wasn't
exactly what I was hoping for when I selected it.
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