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EPUB books can now be borrowed from the library

January 17th, 2009 Posted in ePub Blog by Mike Cook

CLEVNET Library LogoI Twittered (twitter.com/epub) about the Cleveland Public Library press release when it was first announced, and David from TeleRead has also written a post on this. “This” being that the Cleveland library is the first library to offer up eBook downloads in the EPUB format! Naturally this is great news for the EPUB fans, but more importantly it’s great for the general public at large.

OverDrive are providing them and another 8,500 libraries access to EPUB books for borrowing. We must also presume that as OverDrive increase their number of EPUB titles , all these libraries will be offered them too.

As TeleRead mentions, it would be great if they could also offer their books via popular iPhone readers such as Stanza which could then encourage younger readers to get back to books.

I expect 8,500 libraries is a good coverage across the U.S. but as an European I hope our libraries can strike a similiar deal. If both sides of the big pond can offer up these services then there’s potential for more countries to follow suit, which would be particularly useful for those where moving a ton of paper books around can be quite difficult and expensive.

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Tags: ePub Format, iPhone, Libraries, OverDrive, TeleRead, Twitter

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under ePub Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “EPUB books can now be borrowed from the library”

  1. Aaron Miller Says:

    January 17th, 2009 at 11:08 pm

    I noticed they are being billed as “Adobe EPUBs” with a digital editions icon on that library’s website. I’ve seen this billing on Overdrive’s site too. Interesting to see how the format’s being touted in different arenas. I’d be really curious to see one of these Overdrive/Adobe “EPUB” files. Presumably they are using some kind of Adobe DRM?


  2. Mike Cook Says:

    January 17th, 2009 at 11:24 pm

    I can’t imagine them not using the Adobe DRM.

    The press release states that the books can be borrowed for X amount of days, I’d say the DRM disables the book after this time period.


  3. tom Says:

    February 25th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    The BnH (a french digital library) was the first european library to offer up eBook downloads in the EPUB format (with Numilog, a european distributor of eBooks and audiobooks)


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