A Second Elending Paper is Being Published

A second paper from the Elending Project is being published. This one covers the 100,000 title study done of OverDrive’s Marketplace in 5 countries:  Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

 Download it here.

As previously posted in our news, the Elending Project is an Australian Research Council Linkage Project, led by Associate Professor Rebecca Giblin.

Professor Giblin had the following comments on the paper for ReadersFirst:

“The headline findings from this second paper are that publisher licensing practices are making it infeasible for public libraries to hold many culturally valuable titles in their collections, particularly older books. We show also that ebook prices to libraries have nothing to do with title age, country it's licensed in, or the rights libraries get in exchange for their money - instead, they're set completely at publisher whim.”

The Group’s work is not done. Professor Giblin adds “We're now continuing on with our analysis of the survey results and then beginning to formulate our recommendations about how law and policy ought to be reformed in light of this new evidence.”

The paper gives considerable evidence for things librarians have thought about the library eBook market based on our experiences but perhaps not always backed up with actual study. It is well-worth reading. If you agree, I hope you will share it elsewhere. ReadersFirst eagerly awaits the Elending Project’s recommendations.

Full disclosure: this paper cites work conducted by ReadersFirst and the author’s library provided access to collect the USA data in the study.