School Library Loans Via Kindle: Jeff Hastings Weighs in on OverDrive's partnership with Amazon
RSSBy Jeff Hastings
I grew up near Buffalo, NY, a place where it was easy to establish what has become a longstanding personal tradition of mine: I only root for sports teams that never ever win. So, given my enduring knack for choosing losers, it came as no surprise when, after finally breaking down and buying a Nook in March so I could download ebooks from my public library, Amazon announced in April that it would soon support ebook loans to Kindles, too. Figures—that’s how I roll. Furthermore, Amazon revealed that instead of just caving in and supporting EPUB ebooks with Adobe DRM on the Kindle—like everyone else—it was instead partnering with the popular ebook distributor and library lending platform provider OverDrive to give Kindle and its app users the ability to have ebook loans sent directly to their devices in Amazon’s proprietary AZW ebook format. Although OverDrive’s marketing director, David Burleigh, told me that the exact mechanics of ebook loans to Kindles have yet to be determined, it’s clear that, when it’s ready sometime later this year, the download experience for Kindle users will be seamless; you won’t have to tether the reader to a computer running Adobe Digital Editions as you do with other readers (like my Nook). Pretty shrewd move, Amazon. Darn you! A school library can get started for a minimum annual cost of $4,000. That amount covers up to 2,000 students. Half the cost covers the setup and hosting of your collection on a website that you can integrate into your school library site, and then customize and brand to taste. You then use the remaining $2,000 to select titles for your patrons. You can populate your collection with ebooks only or mix in audiobook titles available in WMA and MP3 formats. In most cases, the ebooks you choose to loan function just like their print counterparts; pricing is also similar and individual titles cannot be loaned concurrently. Ebooks become unusable on patrons’ devices when the loan period you choose—generally from one to three weeks—expires, but the titles remain in your collection, year after year, for as long as you renew the contract. A notable exception are titles published by HarperCollins, which decided back in February to make their ebooks unusable after 26 loans. Boo! So, how big of an ebook library can you set up for the minimum cost? Since prices vary, it’s hard to say, but a collection of between 100 and 125 titles should be possible to establish that first year. Do the math and the per-title cost is pretty steep initially, but if you spend the same amount the following year, you can double your offerings and cut that per-title cost in half. And every year you renew your contract—just as is true with a print collection—you can offer more and spend less money per title doing so, without some of the costs associated with loaning print titles, such as processing, reshelving, loss, and repair. For $1.50 a title, OverDrive will supply you with MARC records so that your ebooks will show up in your catalog, complete with live links so that your students can borrow ebooks directly from your OPAC.
Why offer ebooks that can only be read on specific devices? Hedge your bets, and you’ll be sure to pick a winner: consider OverDrive’s School Download Library.
Actually, though I’m a bit miffed that I may have bet on the wrong horse in the Ereader Dominance Derby, the bigger fact is that Amazon’s announcement represents a huge win for all of us. Finally, school librarians will have a single platform from which we can loan ebooks that are readable on virtually any device our students choose to carry—whether it’s a Kindle, Kobo, Sony Reader, Nook, laptop, BlackBerry, Android device, iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. There’s no longer a need to select a preferred device and take a clunky, scattershot approach to lending ebooks. And that has me very excited about the prospect of joining the 100-plus school systems that have already rolled out their School Download Library collections. Are you interested, too? If so, here’s an overview of how it works:
Author Information
Jeff Hastings (hastingj@howellschools.com) is a library media specialist at Highlander Way Middle School in Howell, MI.
