Overdrive Inc.
October 14, 2015 at 2:55 pm
Fittingly, at the international Frankfurt Book Fair, OverDrive announced a significant global expansion. Adding 300,000 titles to its catalog, the ebook provider now offers books to schools and libraries in over 50 countries and in 50 languages. OverDrive added titles from more than 100 publishers, including Faber & Faber, Simon & Schuster U.K., Penguin Random…
March 23, 2015
The recent news that Rakuten is acquiring OverDrive, as Gary Price reports on Infodocket, is, or is not, news. It's news if you didn't see this coming (shame on you!), but not news if you have been observing the industry of late. As I have noted on the Kitchen before, the environment is ripe for consolidation. We will see more of it in the months ahead. Sometimes consolidation is simply a matter of buying up market share, a tried and true strategy in mature markets, and sometimes there is a deeper component to it
September 22, 2014
Amazon, if you're reading this, we need to talk.
There's been a flurry of blogging, largely from the USA, around the recent announcement of your new service, Kindle Unlimited (not yet available in the UK). For $10 a year, Kindle users have unlimited access to 600 000 e-books and a couple of thousand e-audiobooks.
People have been asking "Why do we need libraries anymore?"
Some of the blogs have been looking at the possible impact on public libraries, with a couple taking the predictable line of "Hey! Why do we need expensive buildings
August 25, 2014
In our latest reader poll, we asked all about your audiobook habits. 1059 Riot readers answered the call. Here's a look at the numbers. I've offered some commentary and interpretation. What do you make of the data?
July 28, 2014
In a long-expected move, Amazon on July 18 announced the launch of Kindle Unlimited, a new subscription service that will give users unlimited access to a selection of 600,000 ebooks and more than 2,000 audiobooks on Amazon Kindle devices and any device with a Kindle app for $9.99 per month. Amazon is not first to market with an "all you can read" commercial ebook subscription platform-it follows last year's launch of Scribd and Oyster. But the online retailer's financial resources, marketing clout, and massive base of Kindle users will doubtless raise consumer awareness
June 12, 2014
Amazon has a 78% market share of Hachette Livre e-book titles in the UK and a 60% share in the US, an Investor Day presentation by Hachette Livre has revealed. The presentation, made public on the company's website and first reported by Publishers Marketplace, has shed fresh light into how hard the publisher must be being hit by its current row over terms with Amazon in the US, which has seen pre-ordering removed from selected Hachette Book Group titles. The presentation has also discussed a necessary "rebalancing" between the company's US and UK operations.
June 3, 2014
Barnes & Noble sent an email to their customers yesterday, announcing that they will be shutting down their downloadable audiobook section at the end of the month. No explanation has been given, but customers are advised to download their audiobooks one last time and back them up. B&N's audiobook section was supplied by OverDrive, and thanks to the DRM you'll need OD's Media Console app in order to download the files. You can find more information in the email below or in the FAQ on the B&N website.
May 20, 2014
More self-published ebooks are coming to a library near you, as self-publishing site Smashwords partners with Overdrive, the country's largest digital library distributor.
Digital self-publishing site Smashwords is making its ebooks available to more libraries through a partnership with Overdrive, the country's largest digital library distributor. Through the partnership, Overdrive library clients - the company works with about 28,000 libraries and schools worldwide - will be able to purchase about 200,000 ebooks by 88,000 Smashwords authors and lend them out to their patrons.
May 7, 2014
OverDrive announced today that eBooks from more than 20,000 schools and libraries in its U.S. network are available to be used with Amazon's Kindle FreeTime. OverDrive is the only supplier of eBooks to schools and libraries with support for Kindle devices.
March 12, 2014
Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) have announced early details of the conference program for the upcoming IDPF Digital Book 2014.
