Tag Archives: random house

Not enough library e-books to feed your new gadget properly? Well-stocked national digital library systems could help

If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some [...]

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Amazon’s zapping of customer’s Kindle library shows why we need library-provided ‘content lockers’ for e-books and perhaps other media

Update, Oct. 23: Amazon has restored the customer’s past purchases even though this hardly clarifies all the issues. Scroll to the bottom of the Computerworld UK item. What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such [...]

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OverDrive gets loan of up to $1M from Ohio county with budget-challenged libraries: Taxpayers unwittingly encouraging online privatization of U.S. library system?

Related: More bargaining power via OverDrive bypasses? In recent years, the cash-strapped public libraries in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, have resorted to such economy measures as staff layoffs, trim-backs of branch hours, vexingly higher fines, longer waits for books, and, of course, reductions in acquired titles. The state of Ohio hasn’t boomed, either. Maybe the economy [...]

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Hello, ALA? Open-mindedness and an e-book ecosystem would be the best responses to prices increases from Random House—and other challenges

I’ve warned libraries they’ve got too little to bargain with. Publishers have the upper hand despite the sales that libraries can drum up through exposure of titles from various houses. Notice that most of the biggest publishers have backed off from the public library scene—and now Random House has jacked up e-book prices as much [...]

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