Penguin Making EBooks Available to Some Libraries
Cautiously returning
Penguin announced yesterday that they are working with 3M on a pilot program to again make their e-books available to the New York and Brooklyn Public Library systems.
The catch? Titles will not be released until six months after they go on sale through retailers and they will expire after a year, with an option to renew. The prices will be “in the same range as prices that retail consumers pay.” (the Wall Street Journal).
Chris Platt of NYPL tells the Wall Street Journal that he hopes Penguin will eventually “agree to make some titles available immediately, while retaining the six-month delay for hot-selling titles. Exposure of first-time authors in libraries, for example, could boost sales.”
The deal was announced just three months after Tony Marx, NYPL President and CEO told publishers that he would be willing to consider introducing more “friction” into the lending of ebooks to address their fears that library lending would affect the nascent consumer market for ebooks.
It’s a sign of the times that the story of this cautious change was broken by the Wall Sreet Journal (Libraries Cut E-Book Deal With Penguin). The NYT also ran a story in their Media Decoder blog.