Offering new services in order to meet the expectations of their patrons has always been one of the challenges public libraries must deal with. The commercial e-book market is escalating and e-reading is becoming more and more popular, so it’s not strange that public libraries have studied the possibilities of offering e-books to their patrons.
Civic Agenda and the digital library organisations for The Netherlands (Bibliotheek.nl) and Flanders (Bibnet), along with professor Frank Huysmans with the financial support of Taalunie have carried out a study and published a report (last 12th December) “benchmarking the performance of 18 public library e-lending models across 15 countries in Europe and North America” including Belgium/Flanders, Czech Republic, Estonia, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States and Canada/Quebec.
This new study “highlights that cooperation and collaboration between libraries and publishers represents a key ingredient for e-lending success – alongside the readiness of libraries to share their knowledge and experiences of e-lending with each other”.
The study shows the different approaches at the different countries and aims to “deliver an e-lending model through which libraries can offer all e-book titles available to all interested patrons”.
You can read the full text here: A Review of Public Library e-Lending Models
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