Imagining a Better Ebook Library

[ysabetwordsmith]

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

Comments

[ankewehner]

A service offering "ebooks" only online and not downloadable is better than nothing, but seems anything but ideal to me, what with my ereader having neither WiFi nor G3 capability. :)

"Ebooks" as websites would be relatively simple to do, though. In addition to the "accessible only through subscription" bit you'd need some way for authors or publishers to add books to the system, but it should not be too difficult with epub files, which are essentially zipped html pages. What I wouldn't know how to start on at the moment is bookmarks in the middle of longer sections, but it'd depend a bit on how books are displayed, anyway.

Something where people could download temporary ebooks that would disappear after a limited time would probably be harder to build.
That is how library ebooks now work, pretty much. They have Adobe DRM, which is supported by a lot of ereaders already, with a time limit. When the time limit is up, the file cannot be opened anymore. So I think it mostly would be a matter of money for licensinsing. *does a search* Uh, quite a bit of money. Which explains why most libraries go through Overdrive rather than having their own system, I guess.