Have you heard the big news? Penguin Random House announced December 3 that it will implement perpetual access for all of its eBook titles and cap prices per title. The new structure will phase out the Penguin model of one-year lending and reduce the price for some previous Random House titles with a $65 cap on all Penguin Random House e-titles starting January 1. Sounds good until you compare this cap with what a consumer pays for eBooks and print titles. This is progress, but is this as good as we can expect in library land?
American Libraries has been keeping track of “the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, and Hachette Book Group) and the terms they offer to libraries for their ebooks.”
Their “updated matrix (PDF file) provides a complete list of the distributors that each publisher uses and fuller information about library consortium access, including specifics for public, academic, and school library access.”
Things to note:
Among the Big Five, only Hachette Book Group does not offer public libraries the opportunity to license its ebooks through consortia
The publishers are not as open to school library consortia.
Academic library consortia may license from Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Macmillan.
Simon & Schuster does not license to academic libraries at all.
Have you heard the big news? Penguin Random House announced December 3 that it will implement perpetual access for all of its eBook titles and cap prices per title. The new structure will phase out the Penguin model of one-year lending and reduce the price for some previous Random House titles with a $65 cap on all Penguin Random House e-titles starting January 1. Sounds good until you compare this cap with what a consumer pays for eBooks and print titles. This is progress, but is this as good as we can expect in library land?