Kansas and ebooks

[UPDATE added below]

There was a nice editorial in the Hutchinson News the other day about ebooks in libraries.  Specifically, the travails of the State Library of Kansas and their struggle with the digital media vendor OverDrive.

Here is an article that sums up the whole situation quite nicely.  That article summarizes the Kansas vs. OverDrive fight in a bit more detail and provides more information about what's coming.  Here at HPL, we have had our own separate contract with OverDrive for many, many years.  We signed on with them originally to provide downloadable audiobooks and we have amassed quite a "collection".  As we look for a more permanent, more elegant, and hopefully more economical method of collecting and distributing ebooks, we will, in the meantime add some ebook titles to our OverDrive collection.  Right now, the collection is rather tiny.

I think there will be other solutions, but as the "Librarian in Black" says, (and I paraphrase) the licensing (rather than purchase) of digital material destroys the cultural role of libraries in their communities.  With a license model, no longer will libraries preserve the cultural heritage of civilization.

[UPDATE]  It would appear that in the planned statewide 3M Cloud Library it will be possible to integrate a local library's catalog with the statewide ebook library.  This would mean that patrons would use his/her local library card (rather than the Kansas Library Card) to access the state ebook collection.  It looks like it might be a bit pricey, but it would definitely give us some statistical feedback regarding usage of the service by HPL patrons.