Thursday News: All Romance’s new mobile app, ebooks expensive for Canadian libraries, rare books school, and Girl Scouts support transgender girls
Publishing NewsCanada / Ebooks / Girl Scouts / LGBTQIA+ / mobile apps / public libraries / rare books9 Comments
All Romance® eBooks releases a shiny, new site for mobile phones and tablets! – All Romance ebooks has launched a mobile app for their more than 480,000 registered users. According to the email sent to customers,
Purchases can be made with the click of a mouse or the touch of a link using All Romance’s secure “Buy Now” option, or users can elect to pay with Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, or their available eBook Bucks, the company’s in-store currency. Books are then immediately delivered to the buyer’s online library where they can be gifted or downloaded for viewing. Books in the library can be sorted by purchased date, published date, title, or author. There’s even an archive function to help readers distinguish between the books in their virtual to be read pile or on their keeper shelf from those that will remain in the stacks. Those who like to maintain a wish list will be able to do that too. And, those who need a little extra help will be able to access troubleshooting tips and initiate support requests directly from their device. –All Romance eBooks
E-book prices marked up too high, libraries protest – Vickery Bowles, city librarian for the Toronto Public Library, is concerned with the huge mark-ups publishers charge on digital books for Canadian public libraries. While demand for digital content at the Toronto library has increased 4,200 percent in the past seven years, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for libraries to afford and/or justify the expense associated with digital books. Part of the problem, of course, is that digital books don’t have the same shelf life that print books have. However, if libraries can no longer afford to purchase digital content, then they are not sufficiently serving the public interest.
With print books, libraries have traditionally paid less than retail price for copies. With e-books, it’s the opposite.
Some publishers charge libraries up to eight times retail price for “perpetual access,” where the book remains in their collection forever. Others charge a more “reasonable” price, such as $30 per copy, but allow access for a limited period of time, such as a year, or a limited number of borrowers. Once the limit is reached, the book disappears and the library has to repurchase it.
“Those are not sustainable models,” Bowles said. –CBC News
LEAVE YOUR SCREENS BEHIND (MOSTLY) AT RARE BOOK SCHOOL – Holy smokes, this is so cool! Forget summer camp – you can be among the 425 people who spend a week during the summer learning about rare books and experimenting with a number of techniques used to produce them. Admission is competitive, so get your application in early.
But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers. –Atlas Obscura
AFTER SUPPORTING INCLUSION OF TRANSGENDER GIRLS, GIRL SCOUTS CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN EXCEEDS $250K – When the Girl Scouts of Western Washington had to return a $100,00 donation because it excluded organizational support for transgender girls, the organization was looking at a loss of about a third of their yearly budget. So they decided to crowdfund, and within a few days, news of the original donation spurred more than $250,000 and still climbing. Of course, the Girl Scouts are known to be more inclusive than the Boy Scouts . . .
“It’s all about inclusion. When you get right down to it, what every parent wants for their child is for them to be able to be accepted and have a sense of belonging and just be able to explore what they’re interested in,” Girl Scouts of Western Washington CEO Megan Ferland tells Fast Company. “Whether it’s a week in the woods at camp, or in a science program, or selling cookies and learning business skills. That’s what it’s about. Every girl should have that chance.” –Fast Company
The Rare Book School – Oh, I want …
Realistically, wouldn’t rare books be really made by destroying most of the other copies?
BN has revamped their site, and I’m not sure it’s for the better. Although it seems you can now add e-books to your shopping cart, along with the single item instant purchase they’ve always had.
Print books wear out. eBooks don’t. Print books have to be transported from library to library (in Toronto, ordering a book from another library in the system and having it delivered to a closer library is VERY common). eBooks don’t.
8 times retail price to have a book FOREVER doesn’t seem unreasonable.
As I’m certain some writers will ask this, the Toronto Public Library doesn’t accept book donations. I’d happily place my self-pub eBooks in their system for free (because I believe in libraries). I used to donate barely used print books to the library until they refused to accept them. Now I leave them in the free book boxes.
Amended to say: My branch doesn’t accept donations. I have to go to one of the central libraries to donate a book and then, if it accepted (and often romance isn’t), it isn’t added to the collection. It is resold.
I contacted them about placing my eBooks and was told there was no interest.
I’ve noticed recently that TPL has had fewer and fewer titles available on release day and none available for pre-release holds, so this is really helpful. I was going to contact the library to complain about the reductions, but from the sound of it, it’s not something that can be addressed by TPL or even by Overdrive.
@Cynthia Sax – I find that unbelievably frustrating and mind-boggling. To reject a book and consequently not save the money they now have to spend to acquire it, or to accept it and put that book on sale and receive pennies on the dollar…which then go to acquisitions? How is this logical?
@cayenne: I think there are issues with shelf space, with the effort it takes to ensure there are no duplicates in the system and then add the donated books to the system. It’s easier to buy the books.
I suspect adding donated eBooks to the system is similarly challenging. I don’t have a problem with this (I trust librarians to run libraries in the most efficient way possible) but it is difficult to be sympathetic to book pricing complaints when free books are being turned down.
TPL is a really interesting situation, I think, because it’s such a big library spread across so many branches in a big city (well, for Canada). I’m always impressed by the sheer number of languages and cultures it supports, and how much it’s embraced technology and helps others embrace it.
I’m a little outdated on this but I also believe that libraries have to have specific binding formats on some of their books, so donated books usually don’t match that. Not necessarily the case with paperbacks. ALSO there are very few used book stores in TO that carry Romance, and that makes me grumpy. There’s better selection at Value Village or the Salvation Army than BMV or Elliot’s.
I also snickered seeing ARE and Expensive Canadian Ebooks in the same sentence, because ARE has some serious geolocation/price issues combined with their shopping cart and I’ve had to stop using them because of it (losing entire wish lists, plus a shopping cart full of books, because ONE had geo-restrictions that weren’t stated on the page happened too many times). Which is a shame as I liked buying there!
I believe in libraries. I have depended on them heavily several times in my life when I could not read any other way. My perspective is skewed by that, obviously, but I can’t imagine that if I were to publish a book, I’d charge more than “cover” price for a library to purchase it. I’d probably even discount it. But that’s just me.
That’s my Girl Scouts. :D