Article

E-Books and Libraries - What's Available for Free

Introduction

A recent survey done by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., found that of 1,201 libraries polled in North America, an average of 41% of libraries report an increase in patron requests for e-books over the past year.  Individual libraries see this in increased demand for OverDrive downloadable books service and NetLibrary digital titles. 

Amidst all the demand is the rapidly changing e-book market.  Publishers and libraries are working through the challenges of compatibility, digital rights management (DRM), and format types, among other issues, and are seeking creative ways to develop a model that provides the service to library patrons.  In February 2011, HarperCollins declared its books could only be downloaded 26 times before the library would be required to re-purchase the title.  The following represents other models that could be considered instead of limiting the number of checkouts per title.

Iris Jastram and Steve Lawson present an option which would allow libraries to buy, lend, and preserve e-books in much the same way libraries purchase print books.  Libraries will purchase, not license, e-books from publishers or other sources. The entire process would be based on current copyright law and libraries would have right of first purchase. If the copyright is not respected, publishers would still retain the right to sue for copyright infringement and damages.

Libraries could retain a third party vendor to manage both access to and preservation of the e-books or some libraries may prefer to self-manage access and storage. In either case, it is essential that the files are preserved, loan policies and copyright are respected, and that patron information remains private.

DRM in the form of copy protection satisfies publishers’ desires not to see unauthorized copies proliferate. Yet this management should be largely invisible, platform-independent, and serve only to prevent the creation of additional complete unauthorized copies.  Copy protection must not interfere with readers’ rights to fair use.  Copy protection should not be applied by the publisher, but by the library, or by a third party hosting the e-books under contract from the library.

Chad Mairn, an Information Services Librarian at St. Petersburg (FL) College offers another model for e-book service. He suggests that library users should have unlimited access to e-books which should include a piece of code that automatically pays the publishers “per read”.   There would be no waiting lines and more people would be reading the same popular book at the same time (one title/many readers). E-books that aren’t read would disappear because, quite frankly, no one wants them anyway.  

Why go to all the expense and labor to get a print book one patron might read, when that person can be made happy with one, and one would hope, cheaper download? Except, will it really be cheaper, as many libraries pay list price for e-books while enjoying discounts on print books?  And will patrons want a download?  The preference of print over download is still the norm, but the preference may well change in the near future. If electronic versions of a title are in the library catalog, will it generate requests for the print version?

Patron authentication will continue to be key to legal sharing of e-books.  Authentication is similar to the model for Freegle music downloads. This model of e-book service is probably cost-prohibitive for most public libraries, but may be a model of e-book service to explore in the future.

More options are being explored by the library community and the conversations continue. Organizations like Library Renewal have been created to do research and form strategic relationships in order to ensure that communities can always reap the benefits of a library, even as technology evolves and content migrates to digital formats.

As these challenges are examined, many websites currently offer free e-books.  These resources range from the original site for free text online, Project Gutenberg, to search engines that search e-book sources.   The variety and quality varies as outlined below.

Baen Books - This science fiction and fantasy publisher is making some of its titles available digitally and includes some well known authors.  About 120 titles are currently available but new titles are being added regularly.  These books can be saved to a PC or sent directly to a Kindle.

Book Lending – Book Lending is a website that matches lenders and borrowers of Kindle e-books.  To participate in lending and borrowing Kindle books, you must first register as a user on the site or connect with Facebook Connect. You may lend/borrow a book once between Kindles. Eligible titles are very limited and mainstream authors are blocked for the most part. The service has been marketed to Kindle owners and is similar to e-book Fling which allows lending of Kindle and Nook titles between owners.  This service is not currently available to libraries.

Digital Book Index- Digital Book Index provides links to more than 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1,800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites, including Gutenberg, NetLibrary, Google, and many, many universities worldwide.  More than 140,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free although there are some titles that do have a download fee.  A device with Internet access is necessary for use and Digital Book Index supports iPad, Kindle, & Nook readers.  Loan periods vary depending upon the e-book source, but most are for online use.  Searching can be done by author, title, author & title, title keyword, and browsing by subject, author, or publisher.  Titles and subjects vary widely from science, history and law to literature, the arts, and children’s books with some going back to the 1600s.

E-Discover the Classics - Colorado Library Consortium and Douglas County Libraries put this site together which consists of 500 classics by authors such as Twain, Austen, and O. Henry.   This library-friendly service provides 466 ‘cleaned’ MARC records which can be downloaded to library catalogs that link to the Project Gutenberg site.  Library patrons would locate classic titles in the local library catalog (Jane Eyre, Emily Dickinson, A Christmas Carol, etc.) and the catalog records include a hot link to the Project Gutenberg site. Each Gutenberg title can be downloaded in one of eight formats for different e-readers. 

Free e-books - Free standard memberships give members unlimited access to e-books in the HTML format and access to 5 e-books every month in the PDF and/or TXT formats. Free-e-books.net is maintained by a group of bibliophiles whose mission is to promote literacy and share their author's messages with the world. Titles include fiction, nonfiction, business, lifestyle; all unknown authors.

Google Books - Google offers nearly 3 million free e-books from the public domain.  Some of the most popular free classics can be browsed in the store using the "Free Classics" shelf.  In addition, they have partnered with publishers and authors to make hundreds of thousands of e-books available for purchase. These include new releases and bestsellers with new titles added to Google e-books every day. Google Books stores a person’s library in the digital cloud, so books can be read on just about any device with an Internet connection. Google Books is compatible with Android phones, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, web browsers and many supported e-readers.

Hathi Trust Digital Library – The Hathi Trust includes titles for online use so an Internet connection is necessary. Download is available only for affiliate users at a cost and currently all member institutions are universities.  The Hathi Trust Working Group recent announced some new features including:

• Views allowing scrolling through volumes, flipping pages similar to a physical book, and viewing thumbnail images of all pages in a volume


• Reorganized and streamlined interface including prominent display of copyright status, and re-positioning of navigation features


• Quick-copy links for individual pages in addition to permanent links for volumes and


• Improved user experience, including progress bar, for full-PDF downloads

Titles can be viewed as an image, text, PDF, and can rotate.  The site allows for full view (full text) and users can move through text, go to, resize, and search in text. True partnering is fee-based with two levels of membership.  The first level allows the addition of content, while the second level involves helping maintain content.  About 26% of the content is in the public domain with a total of 8,221,051 volumes; 4,527,131 book titles and 202,635 serial titles.  The titles themselves are older (pre-1950) academic non-fiction titles although it does include some ancient drama and some Whitman poems.  Some more recent bulletins, papers, and classics are also available.  Full-text content could be useful for term papers.

Inkmesh - This search engine makes it easier to find free e-books and compare e-book prices for the Kindle, iPhone, Sony Reader, Nook and more.  Searching only free e-books is possible; limiting to just Sony, Kobo, Kindle, Smashwords, Nook, and Baen books is also an option.  Each record indicates the devices that are compatible.  Searching by subject allows for narrowing by price and device as well.  There are over 3,500 promotional e-books that appear to be lesser known authors of fiction and nonfiction titles, including self-help, religion, business, science/nature, romance, science fiction/fantasy, literature, and erotica. Browsing subjects is also an option.

Munseys - Offering 20,000 titles in 12 formats, Munseys explicitly identifies proper choice for Kindles, Nooks and Sony Readers. Titles can be found by searching author, title or tags and browsing is available in 39 different categories. The e-book collection has many titles found in the other collections listed, however, some categories offer distinctive titles.  Tip: When downloading a title, first click “Select One” to choose the desired format, then click “download.” 
The Online Books Page - This is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.  This site provides indexing/searching to then link to source sites for free, online digital content. It indexes over 1 million titles including academic, classics, self-published, serials, and a variety of free titles that are full text.    Searches can be done by author, title, subject and LC call number.    Titles must be read online so an internet connection is necessary. There are a variety of formats and restrictions noted where individual sources cite them.

Open Library - Open Library is an online site of over 1 million books and is part of the Internet Archive.    Not all of the titles are available in digital format – some records link to WorldCat where library holdings of physical copies can be viewed.  Also available are e-books for users with an OpenLIbrary.org account enabling the borrowing of the lendable e-books using laptops, reading devices or library computers.  The Internet Archive and participating libraries have selected digitized books from their collections that are available to be borrowed by one patron at a time for free. These books can be read in an internet browser, and PDF and EPUB formats managed by Adobe Digital Editions (and Daisy for the print disabled). You can choose which format you prefer as you complete the borrowing process.  Account holders can borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks.   Books may only be borrowed by one person at a time.  The site provides access to all of Project Gutenberg's books plus hundreds of thousands of others as well.  The selection ranges from Little Golden Books, off the beaten track science fiction, textbooks, and classics from Rudyard Kipling and Shakespeare. 

One hundred fifty libraries have donated scans of 85,000 books which are available for download to patrons of those libraries who donated books. 

Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenberg allows download of over 33,000 free e-books to read on a PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device.  These are high quality e-books previously published by bona fide publishers and digitized with the help of thousands of volunteers. All e-books can be freely downloaded. No registration is required.  Note:  OverDrive has linked 15,000 titles from Project Gutenberg that patrons can download and transfer to their portable devices.  These checkouts never expire and don’t count against loan limits.

Conclusion

Though there are many sites offering access to free e-books, some redundancy exists.  Some sites are more appealing for public library users than others.  Some are free, some levy fees.  Some require an Internet connection while others can be downloaded to a personal device.   Some e-books come with MARC records that can be loaded into a library’s catalog.

Librarians will have to constantly monitor this evolving market as surely as library users continue to purchase e-readers and then look for reading material.  For libraries to succeed and survive, e-books must be part of the library’s menu of services and resources.