About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally downloadable audio books. The collections are still tiny compared with print troves. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-book titles, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of digital books represent less than 1 percent of the library’s overall acquisition budget.
But circulation is expanding quickly. The number of checkouts has grown to more than 1 million so far this year from 607,275 in all of 2007, according to OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries. NetLibrary, another provider of e-books to about 5,000 public libraries and a division of OCLC, a nonprofit library service organization, has seen circulation of e-books and digital audio books rise 21 percent over the past year.
[Snip]
Academic publishers have been more willing to experiment with subscription models, inviting libraries to pay an annual fee for unlimited access to certain books. Scholastic Inc., the children’s book publisher, also offers library subscriptions to BookFlix, a collection of picture books that children can read online.
*** Even if you're library doesn't subscribe to the ebrary service, you can still have access to over 20,000 titles online (a subset of the full ebrary database). Head to Shop.ebrary.com. Once your on the page you can quickly register for the ebrary Discover. It's free. However, you'll need a credit card and must put on a small amount of money, let's say $5.00, toward your ebrary account. Once completed, you'll have complete full text searchable access to 20,000 titles (multiple academic and general interest subject areas). Why did you need to place the money on the credit card? The only fee with ebrary Discover is to print or copy a page. If you do, the cost is deducted from the $5.00. Most pages cost about $.25 to copy or print. You can always put more money on your credit card if you want to copy/print more content. Pretty cool, isn't it!
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