EBook Library

Ebook Library (EBL) is an Australian unlisted public company, founded in 1997 by Australian bookseller, Stephen Cole. Ebooks Corporation is a leading global provider of digital books. They have long-standing, close working relationships with Adobe, Microsoft, Palm and other stakeholders in the ebook industry. Ebooks Corporation launched its retail ebook store, www.ebooks.com in September 2000. Ebooks Corporation launched EBL in 2004 to serve academic and corporate libraries. Ebooks Corporation also licenses its technology to leading bookstores and publishers such as Cambridge University Press and Dymocks, a leading Australian book retailer, to power their own ebook offerings.

Libraries will receive a 3% discount off prices and the first three Wisconsin libraries to subscribe will have their $3,000 set up fee waived.

EBL introduced the Non-Linear Lending model, pay-per-view access, demand-driven acquisition, ePacks, and downloading for all titles. Features include, Patron-driven selection, toward purchase or as a short-term loan, includes a free five-minute browse to allow patrons the means to evaluate the title—a significant factor in lowering the cost of on-demand acquisition, up-front selection of titles by the library, no software required for online reader—easy access for patrons, all titles have multiple simultaneous access, works equally well with Macs and PCs, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Linux, authentication of each user allows for elaborate use reports, saved notes, perpetual access to the titles, including an archival copy, compatibility with electronic ebook readers.

The collection contains just under 130,000 ebook titles from more than 350 academic publishers and is growing rapidly.

Doug Way, Head of Collection Development at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, recently wrote of their work with EBL,

We're thrilled with how the patron-driven program is going. In fact, in this coming fiscal year we plan to make available to our users most of the 50,000 EBL titles we currently don't have in our catalog. The cost is less than we had budgeted (we just took a wild guess and crossed our fingers with that) and are happy with our cost per use. We are also very pleased with the quality of books being selected and are finding that depending on the program approximately 10-30% of the books liaisons would have selected for purchase are available in EBL (we've been using spot-checks where a liaison has a pile of titles to acquire to determine this). This will allow us to reduce book budgets in many of those areas in the coming fiscal year and it helps move us toward our goal of making a significant portion of our acquisitions patron-initiated purchases (freeing our liaisons to focus on other initiatives outside traditional collection development).