From the full story at Publisher’s Weekly:
“‘Libraries buy direct from us and they own the content,” said [George Scotti, Springer Verlag’s director of channel marketing]. ‘Once users download content, they can give it out, share, whatever. They own it.’ Scotti explained that once libraries have paid for the content, the e-books are available without charge to everyone at these institutions, so there’s no need to repost or redistribute it online. Once the e-book is downloaded from the library, no return is necessary. ‘Some of our competitors are afraid to do this,’ Scotti said, ‘but we say, free the content.'”
Springer’s ebook offerings amount to “40,000 titles in the PDF format in the science, technical, and medical category (including some textbooks).”
More at Publisher’s Weekly and at TeleRead.
I don’t think of pdfs as ebooks, otherwise
I’d say that we’ve been giving away hundreds of titles for years. We have downloadable pdf editions of (full, 3 or 400-page texts) study guides for GED, ASVAB, ACT, Nursing, Real estate, math, english, college entrance exams, border patrol, EMT, police officer, citizenship, Spanish-language books, air traffic control, paralegal, pharmacy tech, resume writing, postal worker, homeschooling, …
I think it’s over 400 titles… all totally DRM-free…
All available with your library card. So any user can download all the titles and keep them forever and share them with whomever, whenever they want. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.
Of course
The library still has to have the money to buy the ebooks in the first place.
However great the provision is for me and many others I know it’s a totally moot point.