netLibrary goes retail
Up until now, most of this has been about e-books and retailing of them because that seems to be where the action is but there is one company that does something different with electronic books. netLibrary, a Boulder Colorado firm focuses on providing on-line texts to libraries. The advantage to this for libraries is that they don't have to buy, catalogue or shelve the books. And there are never any overdue books. The library user can order the book on-line from netLibrary using their home computer and their library card. netLibrary then sends the book via phone line to the patrons computer. The library is charged only for the books that are actually borrowed. After the specified loan period the book automatically "returns" to netLibrary for the next borrower. This means that libraries can save money by only "buying" the books that their patrons actually want.
This week netLibrary announced an expansion of their business plan to include the sale and distribution of e-books on the net. They plan eventually to (with the permission of the publishers) make their entire inventory of over 18,000 titles available for sale in several electronic formats; PDF, Rocket, Glassbook, etc. netLibrary will supply copyright protection, conversion and distribution. Their first offering will be books available to be read by the Glassbook Reader. This is a free program available at Glassbook.net. It turns PDF files into what Glassbook likes to call "high-fidelity" e-books. It allows the reader to magnify the font, display colour, search via key-words, bookmark and change to page orientation.
The first book offered by netLibrary in the Glassbook format will be Russian President Vladimir Putin book "First Person". netLibrary was a late starter in the rush for
"Riding the Bullet" because Simon and Schuster wasn't thinking about libraries when it released the Stephen King book and didn't offer it to netLibrary until their error was
pointed out to them. Even so, netLibrary sold 10,000 copies of the book. This success might have been the impetus for netLibrary to move into the area of retail sales, that and the
fact that publishers are becoming more comfortable with electronic distribution of titles and netLibrary is leaving the decision up to the publishers as to whether or not they want to
make their titles available for sale. netLibrary has the capability to supply readers with books either on-line or by download to a PC or by download to a PDA using Palm OS or
Windows CE, other devices will be coming in the future. To find out more about netLibrary's "Unbound Books" go to
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