OverDrive and Sourcebooks are preparing to launch an innovative and ambitious pilot program whose goal is to clearly demonstrate the impact libraries have on book sales and author recognition. OverDrive sent a letter today to about 35,000 librarians worldwide and invited them to opt in to a program that will run from May 15 through June 1 and allow all participating libraries to feature simultaneously on their OverDrive home page, at no cost, a single title from Sourcebooks.

All of the Big Six publishers have, for the first time, agreed to make e-books available to public library users.

Explains what hoops users need to jump through for various (mostly academic) ebook providers.

Marie Turek, product manager, e-books and Mendeley at SwetsThere can be quite a bit of variety between publishers, and restrictions in functionality vary enormously. Some suppliers have no DRM but some really restrict it. For some aggregators, DRM is almost on a title-by-title basis. While they’d like to give the illusion of one DRM for all, they are separate contracts and this might not be totally obvious to the end user.

Another take on cataloging ebooks.

Good intro for cont-ed.

Metadata and cataloging problems with ebooks.

Swiss Army Librarian is a blog by Brian Herzog mostly about library and technology issues relating to public libraries

During a visit to Egypt two years ago, George Kerscher, Secretary General of the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) Consortium, found that the country’s major libraries had only a very small collection of books available for print-disabled patrons. And while staff and volunteers were working to make more books accessible, output was limited to only a handful of titles each year. Discerning this as an outsider, ­Kerscher (who is blind himself) realized that it was very much a microcosm of how the process of producing accessible books has traditionally functioned in the United States.

E-books mean a plot twist for public libraries and publishers

Fairy tale characters parade down Main Avenue with light covered floats for Snowdown's largest event.

Leanpub, Net Minds, and the other players in this corner of the publishing world envision a book as a technological enterprise, and hustlers are riding in …

One of my favorite users of CC-BY is Pratham Books in India.

I’ve seen a number of articles recently about schemes to sell “used” e-books, mostly spurred by Amazon’s recent patent on such a process. I’ve seen lots of enthusiasm …