You'll Need a PhD To Make Sense of the Pricing Schemes Publishers Impose on Libraries

Much has been written about publishers' early reluctance to license or sell any e-books to libraries. That is mostly past.

But don't get crazy and think that this must mean there is actual agreement or standards about how to structure the relationships between e-book publishers and their library customers.

Steve Potash, President and CEO of OverDrive, the Cleveland-based provider of technology for managing and distributing digital content for lending libraries, described the various schemes that publishers and producers have structured for charging their library clients for their digital materials.