Submitted by Staff on
Library e-book offerings could get a lot more robust if OverDrive, a distributor of e-books, audiobooks, music and video, has anything to say about it. This week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the company will be meeting with independent booksellers and publishers about its new WIN (Want It Now) Catalog, which will offer long-tail offerings from publishers’ catalogs. According to OverDrive, its 15,000 worldwide member libraries do not have 90 percent of publishers’ catalogs available for lending.
Libraries that opt-in to the WIN Catalog will earn affiliate fees for sales referred through the public library web site.
“The WIN Catalog will take hundreds of thousands of early, midlist and backlist e-book titles that are virtually invisible to library customers and present them for discovery,” says Erica Lazzaro, director of public relations for OverDrive. “WIN will also enable for patrons who do not want to wait for popular titles to become available [for lending] the option to immediately shop for it from a list of booksellers that support their local library.”
It’s a solution that aims to help libraries as well as publishers.
“At this time, libraries do not have the funds to purchase all of the bestselling titles, let alone mid- and back-list titles,” said Christopher Platt, director of collections and circulation operations at the New York Public Library. “With the WIN Catalog from OverDrive, in addition to the tens of thousands of eBooks we offer for lending, we will have the ability to reference, browse, sample and provide a connecting point to entire catalogs of eBook titles, allowing us to serve our patrons and community in the best way possible.”
The associate and affiliate partners powering OverDrive’s “buy it now” links include national and independent stores such as Amazon, Barnes&Noble.com, Powells.com and Books-A-Million. Talks are under way with booksellers in the UK, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
Publishers and retailers can apply to join the OverDrive affiliate network through OverDrive’s online admin portal, Content Reserve (contentreserve.comOpens in a new window).