INTERVIEW
Does the UK have a different attitude to ebooks?
If anyone can spot how different national library services promote ebooks it is Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive. Here he discusses how the UK looks among other nations and shares some best practice from other territories.
PHYSICAL book lending – everything physical – suffered during lockdown. High inflation could cause more problems for physical books, with implications for public libraries. Ebooks are a remedy – they might work in situations where physical books don’t. Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive – which he founded in 1986, and which now serves 76,000 libraries and schools in 94 countries – makes a diplomatic defence of why that remedy wasn’t as effective as it could have been in the UK during the pandemic. Research by the University of Strathclyde shows that massive drops in physical lending were not replaced by digital lending, and one interpretation has been that library users were given the choice of borrowing ebooks, but chose not to.
Steve doesn’t challenge the data but only “a false premise” that there is “a physical book and an ebook equivalency. It’s not accurate to say that during lockdown the gap in physical book circulation would be replicated through a digital book.” Instead, he says, “I would venture that a significant majority of those who were unable to borrow a physical book during lockdown were totally unaware of the ebook or digital audio option. So, to say we lost hundreds of thousands of checkouts that weren’t replaced by ebooks isn’t a true statement if 90 percent of those folks were unaware of, or had no ability to discover their options during lockdown.”
Not universal
Steve says the scenario in the UK may not be unique, but it isn’t universal either. “The reality is that experiences are different across
28 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Mackinlay (@cilip_reporter2,
rob.mackinlay@
cilip.org.uk) is Senior Reporter, Information Professional.
hundreds of major metropolitan areas and dozens of national markets. Take Toronto Public Library which is only for the city of Toronto. It doesn’t serve the metropolitan suburbs. Last year they circulated over eight million digital books through OverDrive. That’s eight million for one city library. Or look at the per capita engagement for the national library of Singapore. Whether it’s Los Angeles Public Library, or King County (Seattle), or many of the other markets, they’ve had success in educating their service areas about the opportunity to benefit from their library, 24/7 from anywhere. The UK has not evolved to that level of performance when it comes to leveraging the value of the digital book – not like we’ve seen in some of the other more proactive markets.”
Waiting lists worse in UK?
Exploring factors that may impact the take up ebooks Steve was asked why some publishers, like Hachette, are not selling ebooks to public libraries in UK and Ireland. He said that
June 2022
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