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By David Rothman

The big gorilla among e-book suppliers for public libraries is OverDrive, providing more than 100,000 titles to 8,500 libraries in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere—including such major institutions as the New York Public Library. Why?

image “Library partners cite OverDrive’s provision of a locally branded-portal to manage their eBooks, audio books, music, and video,” says an IFLA survey of interest to library fans, publishers, libraries and tech companies. The survey covers a bunch of topics, but this one leapt out at me.

“Publishers and other copyright holders report confidence in OverDrive’s secure DRM-content protection and user authentication via library card log-ins,” says the survey. “Public library collection development staff cite download software that will allow patrons to access quality collections assembled by local collection development librarians while leveraging the new found portability of audio books, music, and video for 24/7 access.” Ahead are my thoughts—from a user perspective—on OverDrive’s pros and cons and its future.

Good OverDrive

In fairness to OverDrive, it has done many good things, such as introducing DRM-free audios, following complaints from iPod owners and others.  Furthermore, the company has a real knack for marketing, as shown by a bus to popularize e-books—a terrific publicity-generator, when so many library patrons still don’t know about free, downloadable books.

What’s more a whopping 78 percent of survey respondents said that OverDrive was the vendor with which they had the “most positive experience.”

Separately, respondents listed “ease of use for library customers (library card authentication)” and “multiple platforms (MP3 players, iPods, etc.)”  as what they liked most about OverDrive.

Bad OverDrive

That said, ease of use could be much better. I hate typing in library card numbers, which browsers don’t always keep faithfully. Mobipocket DRM used by OverDrive has wasted more than a little of my time and restricted my reading choices (OverDrive wisely is moving away from Mobi).

What’s more, although I’m delighted that OverDrive is into multimedia, I worry that e-book budgets have suffered. Too often I find that a title is just an audio not an e-book, and while individual libraries make the choices, I wish that OverDrive would push actual books harder to them.

Also, it’s frustrating that libraries would reply so heavily on one company rather than teaming up to develop their own technologies in partnership with the private sector.

Future OverDrive

Of course, Google and Amazon haven’t cranked up in the library market in a serious way. Within the next five years, could OverDrive end up an underdog? Or maybe serve as a front-end for the true giants? No telling how this will shake out.

What about libraries’ current investments in OverDrive—not just in money but in staff time? In what ways will the rules of the game change if/when other vendors grow more prominent?

And will old OverDrive offerings be integrated well with, say, those from Google. Can libraries devise and enforce standards to make thorough integration possible for maximum ease of use? And participate more in the development of e-book standards in areas such as shared annotations and reliable interbook linking, when the International Digitial Publishing Forum finally explores such issues? Questions abound.

As I see it, the best solution would be a well-stocked, TeleRead-style national digital library system with OverDrive, Google, Amazon and everyone else serving as contractors—rather than one huge company (most likely Google) running the show.

(Via Kat Meyer and Don Linn.)

 
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