Tag: ebooks

Ebook Review Central for Samhain Publishing September 2011

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> Ebook Review Central> ebooks

This is the third issue of Ebook Review Central. And it is your guide to the Samhain Publishing titles for September 2011.

If you are interested in how this feature came about, or earlier issues, please check out the posts on Carina Press and Dreamspinner for the gory and not-so-gory details. But this week, the focus is on Samhain.

Samhain published 19 ebook titles in September. One of the surprising things about this list is how many Western titles there are. Three Westerns! Maybe there still is a wild, wild West out there someplace.

I always like to make a special note of which books got the most “buzz”, which ones were talked about the most on the list. The Samhain titles were really fascinating in this regard, because there were some huge review numbers racked up by a couple of titles.

Some of that is because there’s a time lapse, these are the September books, and it’s now early November, some of it is undoubtedly good marketing (more on that in a minute) and some is because there were some really great books in this bunch.

Samhain Publishing has done something that I find intriguing, both as a book reviewer and as a librarian. Samhain is participating in Library Journal’s ebook only review program, along with Carina Press. What is unusual about Samhain’s participation is that Samhain ebooks, unlike Carina’s, are not available to libraries on OverDrive. So why does Samhain participate? I confess to being terribly curious. (Full disclosure, I am one of the reviewers for Library Journal)

They certainly get some great reviews from librarians, published in Library Journal Xpress Reviews, and they get name recognition for both their ebooks and the print books. Why Samhain does not participate in OverDrive, I don’t know but I sure do wonder about. It must be a marketing thing.

But speaking of marketing, the first book with a lot of positive buzz this month is Cipher, by Moira Rogers. Not only did Cipher get 10 reviews, all very positive, but there was a lot more. In September, a Cipher giveaway, release party and chat session was held at Fiction Vixen. This was part of a big Southern Arcana Readalong conducted all summer long and cross promoted at Fiction Vixen, Smexy Books and The Book Pushers. It created a lot of anticipation and positive buzz for what looks like a terrific paranormal romance series.

Shiloh Walker’s Locked in Silence is book 5 in her Grimm’s Circle series. I chose it as my second featured book because Ms. Walker is an author who chooses to publish some of her work through traditional print publishers, and some, like her Grimm’s Circle series, through ebook publishers. The author, and the quality of the work, is the same. The popularity, and Ms. Walker’s work is very, very popular, is exactly the same. If hot paranormal romances with demons and angels are what you’re looking for, this series by Shiloh Walker might be a good place to start.

Last, but absolutely not least according to the review, is The Last Detail by Melissa Schroeder. 12 reviews, and all positive. If you like science fiction romance, that’s probably a buy recommendation right there. I’m also overjoyed to see this much interest in SFR! There was also a movie titled The Last Detail with Jack Nicholson from 1973. It’s also about getting someone back to prison, but I think the resemblances probably end there.

Next week’s Ebook Review Central will be the last one to cover September books. Up until now, I’ve been saying that “week 4” would feature a “player-to-be-named-later”. It’s time to name that featured publisher–except it’s going to be publishers, plural. Next week, Ebook Review Central will feature the September books from Astraea Publishing, Liquid Silver Books, and Amber Quill/Amber Heat/Amber Allure.

Tune in next week for another exciting episode.

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand 11-6-11

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books> ebooks> Virtual Nightstand

“The hurrieder I go, the behindeder I get!”

I participated in the Library 2.011 WorldWide Conference on November 2, conducting a webinar on genre fiction. I’d never conducted a webinar before. Well, now I have. But the prep time threw my reading schedule off. A lot.

And I still have stuff to read for this week!

I review ebooks for Library Journal Xpress Reviews whenever they send me a book. The reviews are published at the Library Journal site, and sometimes they are printed in the Library Journal print magazine. Which is really cool, because it gives me something to show my mom. Last week, I got a book to review for LJ. So I’ll be reading White Hot Christmas by Serenity Woods. My review is due to the editor on November 11.

November 11 is Veterans’ Day. In honor of Veterans’ Day, Bell Bridge Books is publishing a collection of romance novellas featuring Navy SEALs as the heroes, titled SEAL of my Dreams. Proceeds from the sale of the book will go towards Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit fundraiser for veterans’ medical research. I have a review copy of SEAL of my Dreams from NetGalley, and this is one review I want to make sure comes out for the release date.

I need to read both Fallen Embers and Blowing Embers by Lauri J. Owen. I received both books from the author, and promised to provide an honest review. I also promised to provide said review by this Friday. I had intended to read Fallen Embers last week, and didn’t quite make it. So I’ll be reading them both this week.

I mentioned last week that I glommed up half the Carina catalog for November from NetGalley. What was I thinking? I have three books with release dates next Monday, November 14; Dark Vow by Shona Husk, Knight of Runes by Ruth A. Casie and The Hollow House by Janis Patterson. Knight of Runes is definitely a time-travel romance, Dark Vow looks like a fantasy romance, and the description of Hollow House reads like a cross between a paranormal and good old-fashioned gothic! They all looked so good! They still do. Thank goodness none of them are the length of War and Peace, or even the average Charles Dickens’ novel.

Looking back at last week (groan, moan) I still have that archiving problem with Frost Moon and Blood Rock. I have to read them before 11/26 or they will timebomb off my iPad. Never got to Snuff, but at least that won’t go away. And doesn’t that look strange as I write it. Slip Point and The Lady’s Secret are done, I just need to write the reviews. I did finish Cast in Secret. It will be a couple of weeks before I even contemplate Cast in Fury.

The other problem is that I want, I really, really want, to read Scholar, the new book in L.E. Modesitt’s Imager Portfolio series, that will be released on Tuesday. I absolutely adored the first three books, and see no reason that I won’t love this one, whatever the early reviewers might say. But if I can make myself wait, the price will come down. What’s a girl to do, I ask you?

Amazon wants to be your library

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Amazon> libraries

We’ve all read the news by now. Amazon has gone into the library business. And as the Baltimore Sun described it on November 3, this is bad news for libraries.

Amazon’s announcement on November 3 of the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library is a masterpiece of marketing. But the service it offers, at the price point that Amazon is willing to provide it, is a direct shot across the bow of every public library in America.

Any Amazon Prime customer is automatically a subscriber to the new service. There is just one catch. The service only works if you have an actual Kindle! No Kindle app users need apply.

But an Amazon Prime subscription only costs $79 per year, and includes pretty much the same video streaming as Netflix, in addition to 2-day shipping on everything in the Amazon marketplace. For people who do a lot of their shopping through Amazon, this is a great deal. I’m not currently one of those people, but the Netflix to Amazon comparison may make it worthwhile on that cost alone. I can’t say we’re not thinking about it.

The current cost of the lowest price Kindle is $79. That’s a one time cost. Has anyone noticed that three of the very prominently displayed titles in the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library are The Hunger Games Trilogy? This can’t be a coincidence. The Hunger Games ebooks are not available to libraries through OverDrive. They are available as audio through OverDrive, but not as ebooks. Scholastic does have a deal with Amazon to lend through their lending program, but not through public libraries.

Currently, the “Big Six” publishers do not participate in Amazon’s lending library. That’s Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Hachette. But then, two of those six, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster, don’t participate in the library lending space, and HarperCollins’ participation brings up the number 26 and a whole lot of curse words.

But the lending library program is merely another string in Amazon’s bow. Let’s look at what it is again. Any Kindle owner who is already part of Prime Services can borrow one book per month for 30 days, no overdue fees and no hold queues. No muss, no fuss, no additional charges, on a platform they are already familiar with.

What Amazon gets out of this transaction is data, which is also what they get out of allowing Kindle users to borrow OverDrive ebooks from the libraries. They get more data about what people are reading on their Kindles, and they get the opportunity to sell them more Kindle books targeted to them based on that data. Amazon wins big on this.

But I have to contrast the Amazon service with a recent experience at a local library. I decided to finally read the second book in an older mystery series, the Ian Rutledge series by Charles Todd. I listened to Test of Will on a car trip, liked it, and wanted to find Wings of Fire. The library didn’t have it, I don’t want to own it, so I tried interlibrary loan. ILL costs $2. The ebook only costs $7.99. I almost bought it, but I still don’t have a need to own it, and organizing my ebooks is getting to be a chore. I wasn’t worried about how long it would take for the book to arrive, so the month it took to get here was no big deal.

I have three weeks to read it. Not a serious problem for me, I’m used to shorter deadlines, but a nuisance. On the other hand, there’s a 20 cent per day fee if it’s overdue. Since I know the ebook cost $7.99, I’m starting to wonder why I didn’t just buy it, except I’ve already paid $2. And there’s a bookmark in the book to let me know that if I lose or damage the book I’ll automatically be charged $50 until my library settles up with the library that actually owns the book. Since the copy I have is the hardcover, that wouldn’t be $50, but it would be more than $7.99. Obviously, I need to keep the cats away from the book.

I understand about cost recovery. I’ve made all those arguments myself. And multiple times, at that. But I still won’t do another ILL for a book that’s available for under $10 as an ebook. Why? Because the experience is all negative from my perspective. I place the request, and I wait. The book comes in, and I have to figure out when the branch it’s at is open, which is a big issue here. I pay for the ILL, and then I get served with a series of warnings, because the presumption is that I will do something wrong. Those warning labels are attached to the book, just in case I forget them. Then I have to return the book, or I will have to pay again.

The Amazon experience is neutral or positive, and this is true for any ebook purchase from Barnes and Noble and Google and Apple as well. The book is there or it isn’t. Amazon has the special case of the lending library. So someone can borrow it or they can’t. If it’s available for purchase, and I’m willing to pay, I buy it. It automatically downloads to my device, which is already set up from my previous purchases. I’m done. No further charges, no need to go anywhere, no warnings, no fines, no delays. And some potentially helpful suggestions about other books I might like. I’m free to browse further or ignore them and dive into my new book.

Libraries need to be different and good and positive about it. Always. All the time. Whenever we face the public. Are we? If we’re not, Amazon has the potential to do to us what they helped do to Borders.

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand 10-30-11

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books> ebooks> Virtual Nightstand

What am I plotting to read this week, and why?

Looking ahead, I have two Carina Press titles from Netgalley with November 7 release dates. Therefore, both Slip Point by Karalynn Lee and The Lady’s Secret by Joanna Chambers will be high on this week’s TBR  list. Slip Point is science fiction romance, and I almost always grab those when I see them. The Lady’s Secret is a historical romance involving a young woman passing as a boy. That just looked like fun.

It’s interesting that in October there weren’t a lot of Carina Press titles that really grabbed my interest. In November, more than half the catalog seriously spoke to me. There’s a comment in there someplace.

Lauri J. Owen, the author of Fallen Embers and Blowing Embers, sent me copies of both her books for review. I promised I’d get them both read before Thanksgiving, which means I need to read Fallen Embers, the first book, this week. They’re set in an alternate feudal Alaska, which is especially fascinating to me, having lived there for three years. I just have a thing for Alaska stories.

It being the day before Halloween, anappropriately scary activity is to sort my Netgalley active review list by publication date. Bell Bridge Books recently put Anthony Francis’ Skin Dancer series up, and I grabbed them because they sounded like an interesting urban fantasy twist (a tattoo artist whose tats come to life) and because they are set in Atlanta, where I currently live. Oh yeah, and the publisher has archived the titles on Netgalley, but they still live on my iPad, at least until 11/26. So Frost Moon and Blood Rock just moved to this week’s rotation.

From last week, I’m in the middle of Cast in Secret by Michelle Sagara and Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber. I need to finish Darker Still in time to write the review for a November 1 release. And, I need to finish it tomorrow to have it count as one of my reads for Netgalley month.

The problem is that I want, I desperately want, to read Snuff, Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld book. My husband has it on his iPad. But then, I have A Study in Sherlock on my iPad. We can work out a trade for a few hours. The much more serious (hah!) problem is that I mostly read late at night, while my husband is sleeping. That’s fine for trading the iPad. Not so good for the sleeping-at least not with Pratchett. It’s really hard to sleep when the person next to you is giggling every other page.

Ebook Review Central for Carina Press September 2011

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> Ebook Review Central> ebooks

This issue of Ebook Review Central is your guide to the Carina Press titles for September 2011.

Carina published 19 titles in September! For each title, I’ve listed the usual basic info, the title, author, if it’s in a series, suggested category listings from the publisher, the retail price and the ISBN so you can buy it from your favorite ebook pusher. Oops, I meant supplier. No, I meant seller. (If ebooks are your drug of choice, you know already what I mean).

There’s a cover picture, only going to show that we do judge books by their covers.

Following the basic info, there’s the all important grid of review links as of yesterday, 10/23/11. The grid includes the name of the reviewer (if the site provided a name), the name of the site, a link to the actual review, and the grade or rating if one was given.

Grades and ratings generally come in two flavors. Some reviewers grade on the letter scale, A through F. A is great, F is awful, just like in school. Some things never change.  Others rate on a numeric scale, usually but not always 1-5 with 5 being fantastic. Those ratings are represented as 3/5 or 4/5, meaning a rating of 3 on a scale of 5 or  4 on a scale of 5. Occasionally, a rating will defy reduction to either a letter or numeric rank. Those will be posted verbatim.

This first time, and in future issues,  I plan to feature two or three books, based on the reviews and ratings of my fellow book bloggers. These are the books most buzzed about from the publisher listed in the past month.

For the Carina September titles these are the books with the most buzz:

Altered Destiny by Shawna Thomas not only received 8 reviews, but those reviews were almost all positive to the max. Also, Romantic Times (otherwise known as RT Book Reviews) doesn’t review a lot of ebooks, so when they do review one, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. The reviewers describe this as a tempting read for those Urban Fantasy fans out there.

 

 

My second pick is Redemption by Eleri Stone.

There are a lot of excellent reviews, one as recent as this weekend, so word is still going around. This looks like a good book for those who like shapeshifter romances, and that’s a pretty big audience!

 

Last, but certainly not least, a romantic suspense title. Deadly Descent by Kaylea Cross has been reviewed all over the blogosphere so far, everywhere from Dear Author to Smexy Books to the Maldivian Book Reviewer. This romantic suspense title will particularly appeal to those who like to see some military action.

 

 

That’s all for this week. Please come back next Monday for the Dreamspinner Press September review roundup.

Introducing Ebook Review Central

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews> Ebook Review Central> ebooks

So what is “Ebook Review Central“? I’m so glad you asked.

Every Monday, Ebook Review Central will publish a list of all the ebooks published by a particular publisher the previous month, with links to all the published reviews.  Today’s first issue contains all the Carina Press titles for September 2011, along with links to all the reviews as of Sunday, 10/23/11.

In the upcoming weeks I will do the same thing for Dreamspinner Press and Samhain Publishing. I would be interested in hearing from you, the readers, your suggestions for which publisher or publishers to include for week 4. After the 4th week, I’ll cycle around to Carina’s October titles, and back through Dreamspinner and Samhain and “the player to be named later” again.

Why am I doing this? People decide what books to buy based on browsing at a bookstore or recommendations. Ebook-only books can’t be browsed in a bookstore, so we all blog to create more recommendations when we like a book. But each of us blogs about the books we like, and it’s fantastic.

But, when a reader is undecided, where do they go? Amazon or Goodreads, and not all of us post our reviews there. Sometimes none of us. And that debate is for another post someday. Yet an ebook may have tons of reviews.

Also, I’m a librarian by training. Librarians need a place where they can find reviews of ebooks, just like they do print books.  Their budgets are tight. They want to add ebooks from ebook-only publishers, but if they can only buy 3 or 5 Carina Press titles this month and 3 or 5 Dreamspinner titles this month, there is no place to go to find which ones were the best. Ebook Review Central will be that place.

A question that will be asked, because I had to ask myself when I created this, is why the one month delay? Why am I only publishing the September titles now, when it’s already mid-October?

It takes about a month for the blogosphere to generate reviews for all the titles. I wanted to put up last week’s titles this week, but when I started my research, half the titles weren’t reviewed yet.  When I looked at last month’s titles, almost everything had a review someplace. That won’t always be 100% true, but at least it turns out to be a reasonable way to bet.

One other note: Amazon and Goodreads will not be listed as review sources unless that was the only thing I could find.

If you have suggestions, let me know. If you find this useful, definitely let me know. I will update published lists, so if later reviews are published, or if you have a review that should be listed but I missed (Google is good, but it is not perfect), send email to marlene@readingreality.net.

What’s on my (mostly virtual) nightstand 10/23/11

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | books> ebooks> Virtual Nightstand

I realized that I spend a part of Sunday planning the books I’m going to review during the week. It’s sort of a plot, what goes where, and why centered around the publishing schedule. Everything new is released on either Monday or Tuesday. It’s kind of like the law of gravity, without the splat at the bottom.

I also looked around and discovered that there wasn’t a really good place to stick in some of the “why” about the stuff I read. Or some of the extra added attractions, like my mad scramble to read books 1 and 2 (and occasionally 3, 4 and 5) of a series in order for book 6 to make sense.   More on that later.

I get lot of my books from Netgalley, but not all of them. Authors are starting to ask me to review their books. That’s actually kind of a thrill. It doesn’t change my review, but it’s always nice to be asked. I also still have a lot of books in the house I haven’t read. Not to mention what my husband once described as “a metric buttload” of books that I have read. It’s all grist for the mill.

There is a “What’s on my nightstand” meme at 5 Minutes for Books that is really terrific, and I absolutely confess to having gotten my inspiration from them. But I need to do this once a week, and the original “What’s on my nightstand” only runs once a month. I need way more organizational help than that! Also, the instruction for the original asks that you take a picture of the stack, and I would usually be taking a picture of my iPad. My TBR pile is mostly, but not exclusively, electronic.

So what’s on my list this week? (Drumroll please)

The Iron Queen and The Iron Knight by Julie Kagawa. I was able to snag a review copy of Iron Knight from Netgalley, but I had never read any of the series. I heard terrific things about it but never read any of them. Everyone knows what they are, YA urban fantasy or paranormal fantasy, depending on how you slice and dice your definitions. Urban fantasy/paranormal is right up my alley, YA or not, and I wanted to know what the fuss was about. Now I know. Iron King and Iron Daughter were fantastic, but I still have two more books to go, and the release date for Iron Knight is this Tuesday.

Tuesday’s Child by Dale Mayer is a romantic suspense title I received from the author. I promised I’d review it by this Friday, so it’s definitely on my list for this week.

I’ve got Darker Still by Leanna Renee Hieber from Netgalley for a November 1 release date. I requested this one because I liked the Victorian setting, and I enjoyed her story in Midwinter Fantasy. I bought her Strangely Beautiful series on my iPad, but haven’t had a chance to read them yet.

Most of the time, I read ebooks, but I have a paper copy of Cast in Secret by Michele Sagara on my nightstand. For real. Why? Because I have a review copy of Cast in Ruin from Netgalley. I always meant to read the series, to the point where I bought books 1-5 in print. Moved them, too. So when Cast in Ruin came up on Netgalley, I requested it. I figured it gave me a darn good reason to start reading the series. Now I wonder why I never read them before. They’re great! But each book is 400+ pages, and Ruin is book 7. I’ll get there. And I will review it, even if I have to buy my own copy.

Last but not least, A Study in Sherlock, edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie Klinger will be released on Tuesday. It’s a short story collection inspired by the Holmes canon. I know I’m going to buy it, and I know I’m going to read it as soon as it downloads to my iPad. I might as well just admit it now!

There will be other stuff, but these are the ones I’m sure about. More next Sunday!

 

A billion wicked thoughts about ebooks and libraries

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | conferences> ebooks> libraries

On October 12 I attended the second annual virtual conference about ebooks and libraries, sponsored by Library Journal and School Library Journal. The title of the conference was Ebooks: the New Normal, and I wondered, is it really?

The conference itself was really cool. This is a conference about ebooks, after all. It should be a virtual conference. Requiring a physical conference to talk about a virtual product would be either ironic or contradictory. The sessions were great! At the same time, as one of the attendees pointed out on Twitter, it’s hard to sit down for drinks together afterwards to rehash the conference. Putting it another way, hash tags just don’t taste as good as a glass of wine with new friends after the conference is over.

But back to that thought about whether ebooks are the new normal, or not. Ebooks are definitely a permanent part of the library landscape. Ian Singer of Media Source quoted adoption rate statistics that ebooks are in over 90% of academic libraries and over 80% of public libraries. But “in” and “integrated” are two different things. A lot of academic library ebook collections are mostly for research. And a lot of public library ebook collections are just getting started.

What about those “billion wicked thoughts”? One of the speakers in the afternoon Pecha Kucha session was Ogi Ogas, author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire. His advice to libraries regarding ebooks is that we need to not just stock a lot of ebook romances, but that we need to get involved in archiving fanfiction. Wow! Why? Because men like pictures and women like stories, meaning romance fiction. His research follows the publishing trends, and the library ebook circulation trends, that romance sells, and romance circulates. Ebook romances of all stripes and types are the hottest circulating genre of ebooks, and romance authors are the hottest circulating authors except for the big name bestsellers like Patterson and Roberts. Except, hey wait a minute, Nora Roberts is a romance author.

Robin Bradford, Fiction Collection Development Specialist at the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, said something similar in her earlier presentation. She said that purchasing for the ebook collection isn’t like buying for the print collection. She showed the top 20 ebooks from IMCPL, and there they were, hot romance authors in the top 20. Lauren Dane had 4 books in the top 20. (Go Lauren, she’s really good!) Robin’s point in general was that the ebook audience may be different from the print audience and we have to purchase what will circulate. Another one of her comments that was clearly a big takeaway based on the Twitter chat was that the ebook users want the authors’ backlist if it’s available. And it increasingly is thanks to publishers like Open Road Media.

But about that whole normal thing? One of the issues that’s part of the old normal, and an even bigger part of the new normal, is budget limitations. Ebooks may not take up any room, and genre fiction can be less expensive than hardcover books, but library budgets have shrunk. We can reallocate money from some other places, like periodicals, and standing orders, and reference books. But databases also cost more, and that expense isn’t going away.

Libraries do a lot of their collection development from reviews. Not for the upcoming bestsellers, the sure things, but authors and titles they don’t know and have never heard of, they do. When a library is looking at an ebook collection, as Robin Bradford and other speakers pointed out, the library shouldn’t be duplicating its print collection. There are a lot of titles from publishers such as Carina and Dreamspinner and Samhain that are ebook-only, and many are written by new or relatively unknown authors. In other words, if these were print, collection development would look for reviews. Even when the individual titles cost less than $5, the money does add up. There are reviews out there, if a librarian is willing to go hunting through the blogosphere, but that takes a lot of time. Or it’s a labor of love.  Library Journal has been reviewing ebook-only titles in their Xpress Reviews online since July 2011 (full disclosure: I am one of their reviewers), but libraries need more resources in order to integrate ebook ordering into collection development. We need the equivalent of AudioFile or VOYA for ebook only titles, except online, of course!  When that exists, ebooks will  truly be the new normal in libraries.

Who’s with me on this?

Kindle OverDrive

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | Kindle> OverDrive

Kindle books have arrived at an OverDrive library near you!  Or they will any minute now. The two libraries I have access to (I only moved in June, my old library card hasn’t expired yet) both have it.

Does it work? Yes, it works. I tried it, and got an  ebook. It works for Kindle apps, not just Kindles.

So, what does this mean?

This is a classic good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that more people will want to use the library’s resources. The good news  is that more people will be aware that the library has something that they want. In the ereader marketplace, more than 70% of the market is owned by Amazon and its Kindle.  And it’s a very big market. The Harris Poll released on September 19 shows that one in six Americans has an ereader. More than two-thirds of those ereaders are Kindles. Until this week, Kindle owners were unserved by libraries, today they aren’t. That’s a big influx of users into an already rising tide.

The other huge part of this is mindshare. When most people see someone using an ereader, they automatically think “Kindle”, no matter what the device is. I have an iPad, and to most folks of the even slightly geeky persuasion, iPads are very different from Kindles. But in airports, people will still ask me, “Is that a Kindle?” To a lot of people, Kindles mean ebooks. Now that libraries serve Kindle books, we’ve arrived. We know we were already there, but this is a major PR moment that libraries can grab.

And we need to grab it, because this is going to have some…not so good impacts too. Ebook usage was already rocketing skyward in public libraries. Adding the huge number of Kindle owners to the borrower pool is going to send those numbers into the next galaxy. So this will increase demand on a finite supply. Not a finite supply of bits and bytes, but a finite supply of dollars and cents. Library budgets have been slashed everywhere. If demand for ebooks increases exponentially, that does not mean that demand for print books will decrease exponentially. Yes, it is possible, even probable that some users will switch from print books to ebooks if ebooks are available, but not everyone in every format.

We should use this opportunity to promote ourselves and get all the good spin out of this we can. Amazon certainly is. When a Kindle user selects the “Get for Kindle” option from the library’s OverDrive site, they go through a normal library checkout process, and then they are transferred to Amazon’s site for the download. When the user completes the download, what do they see? Other Amazon Kindle titles recommended for them to purchase, based on whatever they just downloaded from your library.

Today, Kindle users can borrow ebooks from their local library. The Harris Poll also confirmed previous studies that ereader owners read more books and buy more ebooks. Amazon gets the library borrowers out of the library site and onto the Amazon site in order to try to sell them more ebooks. There isn’t anything wrong with that. That’s why Amazon is in business in the first place. OverDrive finally gets to offer a Kindle option. That piece has been missing from their service for eons. This is a very big win for OverDrive.

And this is a big win for libraries. Not just because we can finally say “yes” when Kindle owners ask us if they can borrow ebooks. Saying “yes” is definitely better than saying “no”. But because being part of this revolution/evolution could be a way of getting focus on the library for something relatively cool, and we have a chance to leverage that focus into support.