Greenburgh Public Library Blog

So Many Ways To Get An eBook!

Have you ever wondered why the library has several different ways of getting eBooks? If you go to our electronic resources page on our library home page,  you’ll find a half dozen ways to get an eBook: Cloud Library, Overdrive, Hoopla, RBDigital, and Tumble Books. 

Partly, this is because the publishing industry hasn’t devised a preferred method for distributing its books in electronic format to libraries. When eBooks were first introduced to libraries, there were concerns about illegal copying of digital files and a lot of effort went into controlling an electronic format that could be lent by libraries but not reproduced by users.

The cost of eBooks is also a reason there are different lending platforms in libraries. While libraries receive significant discounts from publishers for physical books, usually about 40% off the list price, no such discounts apply to eBooks. In fact, the price of an eBook is usually about three times as much as the retail list price for a hardcover.  So, the newest James Patterson eBook will cost $84.  That same book will cost a library $16 in a hard cover format. Some publishers soften that cost to libraries by limiting the number of times an eBook will be checked out. So they provide libraries a title for 2 years or 24 checkouts for a cost of around $25.  After 2 years, the library can buy another 2 year license for the book or choose not to carry it anymore.

Another issue has been availability. It is a common belief that because an eBook isn’t a physical item several users can access the same book at the same time. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. When a library purchases digital material, it actually is purchasing a license to access the book rather than the book itself. The terms of the license limit the access to one library patron at a time.

In response to that limitation on access to electronic material, some companies developed a new model that allows unlimited concurrent access to the same book. Rather than charging a single fee for an eBook, they charge the library each time the item is checked out, usually $3 or $4 per check out. The downside to this model is that publishers usually limit what's available to older titles, so while you can find a vast array of books, you won’t find current best sellers with this model.

Competition among the makers of eReaders to become the dominant means of downloading and reading eBooks has also been a factor in how we get our eBooks.  Kindle, Nook, and Kobo were all developed around 2006, and exclusively for reading eBooks.  Then came tablets like the iPad, where users could read ebooks and do much more. Then, before long, smartphones could also download eBooks!  As they jostled for primacy in the market place, companies like Amazon, which owns Kindle, aligned with Overdrive to be the exclusive provider of eBooks for Kindle, meaning library users can only get Kindle books from Overdrive.

In this confusing environment, it helps to investigate each of the platforms and see which one works best for you in terms of ease of use, and for the slightly different content they each provide. Overdrive has by far the largest number of titles to choose from including best sellers.  However, because its titles are available to all card holders in the Westchester Library System there is more demand for the Overdrive eBooks and consequently users may experience a longer wait for the most popular titles. Cloud Library has mostly best sellers and popular titles. Greenburgh Library is one of a handful of libraries in Westchester, Long Island and upstate New York that provide the Cloud Library platform to our card holders. Its app is very easy to use, and wait times are minimal if they happen at all.

RB Digital and Hoopla are two very popular platforms that use the pay per use model, meaning all of their titles are available all of the time.  What they offer may not be the newest books, but the volume of available titles is enormous. On Hoopla, for example, lovers of romance titles can find just about any Harlequin title (when I last looked there were nearly ten thousand of their romance books available). We provide these two platforms not only for their 24/7 availability of titles but for the breadth of content they provide.

As you can tell, the evolution of ebooks in libraries has been complicated. Fortunately, library users continue to discover how many ebooks the library offers. Use of our ebook collection has increased every year so that now about one in every four books we check out is in electronic format. With the development of apps for mobile devices, downloading an ebook has never been easier. 

Visit our eLibrary resources page to find the platform that works best for you!