NEW LIBRARY E-CATALOGS OFFER EXPANDED SELECTION
OverDrive Inc., a major e-distributor for libraries, announced Wednesday the launch of a vastly expanded list for patrons, featuring not just e-books available for lending, but hundreds of thousands of those which aren’t, from older releases to foreign-language titles. Viewers can look at excerpts, purchase books from a retailer or request that their library add an e-book that wasn’t being offered.
“We’re allowing libraries to be better connected with their communities,” OverDrive CEO Steve Potash said during a recent interview. “Right now, we have librarians who are trying to add books to the e-catalogue but don’t always know what to add. Now, by exposing a publisher’s entire list, it becomes like crowdsourcing, where patrons can offer their suggestions.”
Potash said he expects the program to begin within a couple of weeks, in a handful of library systems, including New York City, Boston and Cuyahoga County in Ohio.
“If we had an unlimited budget we’d just buy everything ahead of time, so we have to purchase more wisely,” said Michael Colford, director of library services for the Boston Public Library. “There are books which we obviously need, like current best-sellers, but there are a lot more books which aren’t surefire hits. And we would have a much better idea of what to get if our customers were able to tell us.”
The catalog will include offerings from hundreds of publishers, from Random House Inc. and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to Lonely Planet and the children’s publisher Nickelodeon. OverDrive also will feature thousands of foreign-language titles, in Russian, Spanish, Swedish and dozens of other languages
Potash noted that while Random House has digitized over 18,000 books, even larger public libraries offer a fraction of those titles.
For the full article: Yahoo News
