Cited and discussed in a previous post (The Visible Hand of the Market?), Douglas County Libraries has begun a monthly look at pricing for the top 25 e-book best sellers (according to Digital Book World). In this latest report (Sept. 28), pricing is all over the place. Notably, 15 of the 25 best sellers cannot even be purchased by libraries as e-books at this time.
Readers increasingly demand e-book versions of popular titles to be checked out at their local library and online. Library patrons want e-books over every other downloadable media.
As an individual, that reader can always purchase the book from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, because many publishers will sell their titles to/through those retail sites. But some publishers still will not allow their titles to be purchased as e-books by libraries, which relegates libraries to a print-only existence in the publisher-to-reader ecosystem.
What’s a library to do? Month by month, the digital divide deepens.
According to this chart we, as a library, can provide only 9 of the top 25 ebooks to our customers. The other 16 are NOT available to libraries at ANY price. Crazy!