Imagining a Better Ebook Library
Current library handling of ebooks is crummy. Big publishers have arranged it so that the library can only lend the ebook to one person at a time, which cuts out a key advantage of ebooks over paper books. The libraries all seem to use a thing called Overdrive, which does not accept ALL ebooks, so there's a bottleneck problem. Some publishers limit the number of times an ebook can be checked out before the library has to repurchase it. Readers are not thrilled by this, neither are some librarians, but Overdrive seems to have a monopoly for now. I'd like to support brick-and-mortar libraries, but if that's not feasible, I'll settle for supporting reading.
Rather than attempt to scale the castle wall, it may be more efficient to get ebooks into people's hands by going in the back way and creating a virtual library. Put together a collection of ebooks that people can read without those obnoxious restrictions, building the collection from books by individual authors and small presses who get shut out of more mainstream models. For people who want to read ebooks, it would be an efficient way to find a substantial supply of them -- much of which might not be available through more conventional venues -- without having to hunt them down one book at a time.
One useful feature is "I want more of X." Have drop-down menus for all the authors, publishers, and genres that the service already offers. Then a box for listing things that aren't available yet, like "I want lesbian mystery and chromatic SF, but you don't have any." Make the results visible to people who might like to add their books. (A fun crowdfunding option might be to let people make donations to put a 'bounty' on a certain type of book they want added, which would go to whichever author/publisher contributed one.)
Now ideally -- and I'm not sure if this is technologically feasible at the moment -- the content would be visible to subscribers but couldn't readily be saved by them. That's a 'cloud' kind of model, where a person is paying for access rather than ownership, and it's a good virtual version of a library where people read books but don't keep them. It would be straightforward to do with the material visible only on a regular computer; doing that with ereaders might be harder, but would be very helpful in reaching people who love ebooks. Something where people could download temporary ebooks that would disappear after a limited time would probably be harder to build.
There might also be a section of ebooks available for free download, from authors/publishers who feel that giving away a free sample can attract buyers. Ideally, however, all the ebooks in the "lending library" would also be available for sale, in case readers want to keep a copy.
This would probably be more straightforward to launch than trying to break into library access. It's not too hard to put things on password-protected pages of a website. A couple dozen books or so -- preferably in several different popular genres and topics -- could be enough to get the ball rolling. That's a size that could feasibly be gathered by a consortium of authors and/or small presses. Then let it grow from there; hopefully adding at least one new book a week to keep subscribers interested.
Hopefully the subscription price could be kept low, maybe $5/month or $50/year. (The nearest library to me charges $60/year for a library card if you live outside the town limits, which pretty much means rural residents are humped.) Consider splitting that with half the fees going to site upkeep and half getting divided among people who provided books.
I'm putting this out in the open because I think it's a viable idea, but I don't have the webcoding skills to just do it myself. If someone else does, however, I'd be happy to help with concept development, and I do have a couple of books that were dual-published in ebook and paper formats.