Re: Ebooks in libraries

[Jason Griffey <griffey@gmail.com>]

While I won't claim to be able to speak directly for Joe, I will 
speak for myself in clarifying what I think he meant:

Publishers, with a few exceptions (ALA Publishing is doing a good 
job, OReilly publishing as well) are providing ebooks alongside 
models that are not, in the end, as useful as they could be to 
the patrons of libraries. Lack of appropriate format (in my quick 
glance at OECD's catalog on your website, every book I saw was in 
PDF format, which is good for exacting presentation, and bad for 
nearly everything else), an over-reliance on DRM that makes it 
difficult for patrons to use the resources at all, and licenses 
that prevent standard library usage patterns (Interlibrary loan, 
electronic reserves, etc) all conspire to make the current ebook 
landscape a very bad one, overall, for libraries.

Jason


On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 5:45 PM, <Toby.GREEN@oecd.org> wrote:

> Joe,
>
> I'm really puzzled by your final comments - "publishers are 
> still grappling with how to make e-books available to 
> libraries. Who will be the first to cut the knot?".
>
> We, along with many other publishers ranging from Elsevier and 
> Springer to OUP, the World Bank and even World Tourism 
> Organisation, have successfully grappled, cut the knot and have 
> ebooks available for libraries, including all front list titles 
> and many backlist too (in our case, we've got everything back 
> to 1998 in e-book form, around 5,000 titles in all).
>
> Have I missed something?
>
> Toby Green
> Head of Publishing
> Public Affairs & Communications Directorate
> OECD
> 75775 Paris Cedex 16
> toby.green@oecd.org
> www.oecdilibrary.org