The state librarian of Kansas, with the backing of state attorney general’s office, is planning to terminate the Kansas Digital Library Consortium’s contract with ebook vendor OverDrive and is asserting the bold argument that the consortium has purchased, not licensed, its ebook content from OverDrive and, therefore, has the right to transfer the content to a new service provider.
Jo Budler, the state librarian, said she is in negotiations with other platform providers, and that the state consortium will become a beta tester of 3M’s new Cloud Library eBook lending service, which will debut this week at the American Library Association’s annual conference in New Orleans. (3M announced today several other beta testers as well.).
Budler is asserting ownership of all the consortium’s content on OverDrive’s platform, which represents a $568,000 investment from December 2005 to June 2010, with one exception: the MaxAccess subscription it has with OverDrive for audiobooks. Budler refused to sign a renewal contract with OverDrive not only because it would have raised fees nearly 700 percent by 2014 but also would have rewritten the clause upon which Budler is basing her right to transfer content.
okay, let’s see how that works…
If I were Overdrive, I’d give them the books,… then watch as the library spends $$$$$ in court for digital piracy and sued by all the publishers…
but I think all libraries should do this… but 1 copy of an ebook from Amazon or B&N, strip the DRM and distribute the ebooks from library servers… the only problem is, again, I can’t think of a library that could afford the battle….
I’d be surprised…
I’d be surprised if OverDrive had licenses to actually sell the ebooks as apposed to just lease them. In either case I think the real fight may come down with the publishers.