Overdrive Inc.

Self-publishing and online services, e-books, and digital demand printing are joined into a new and powerful sector that is transforming the industry. For industry professionals whose career satisfactions and livelihoods are bonded to the future of the book, this new sector offers a wild ride and a venturesome future.

(Press Release) Cleveland, OH, May 19, 2010—OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), a leading distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, and digital content for libraries, schools, and retailers, announced that it will release a series of apps that will combine eBooks, audiobooks, and interactive and multimedia content into one user-friendly application. The apps will be available for both mobile and desktop operating systems, including Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry. Millions of end users will benefit from a single software solution for all OverDrive-supplied content, as well as on-the-go access to eBooks from OverDrive-powered library and retail catalogs.

Sony has announced that it will convert its eBook store to the industry-standard .epub format by the end of the year. "Adopting an industry-standard format and Adobe Content Server 4, a popular, cross-platform server software solution that copy-protects downloadable e-books, allows Sony to make its eBook store compatible with multiple devices and its Reader devices open to multiple sources for content," a company press release stated. 

Sony Reader and OverDrive Sign Library Marketing Agreement

Consortium Members Can Reduce Waiting Lists With Access to Additional Copies of Popular Download Titles

Barnes & Noble.com (www.BN.com) has launched its Audiobook MP3 Store, featuring audiobook MP3s available for instant download and transfer to iPods, iPhones, MP3 players and other portable devices. The store offers downloads of more than 10,000 titles across all genres. The average price per download will range between $10 and $20.

As Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and president of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), said last spring at IDPF’s annual meeting: The world of digital books is expanding, and there is a steady flow of major publishers and technology providers adopting the .epub standard. What we’re going through now is a ramping-up stage during which it can’t be either/or—nobody is saying that we will accept or deliver only in .epub. Accepting only .epub formats is likely to be the first move that’s made, because the advantage to publishers is that they will have only one electronic book version with one ISBN of which

With the advent of electronic ink, or e-ink, the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle and the .epub formatting protocols, the era of the e-book in the United States may be on its way. If you are a publisher or book producer, sooner or later you will be delivering electronic versions of all of your titles for distribution through a burgeoning network of electronic channels—if you’re not already doing so. It may be tomorrow, it may be next year or possibly later, but I guarantee the need to do so will be thrust upon you by the marketplace. While it is true that complex

I have just returned from the Publishing Business Conference & Expo in New York (full coverage begins on page 10) and couldn’t help but feel that this year, more than ever, there was a sense of camaraderie, a message of “We can do this. Look at all the opportunity out there.” In an interview for this issue, Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide (see the story on HarperCollins on page 18), said, “I think that, in the past, publishers have been afraid of change. … What we’re all seeing now is that experimentation is necessary, and … everybody is facing the

“We are leading the pack by building a digital warehouse, which is the digital equivalent of our print warehouse,” commented Jane Friedman, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, in the May issue of Book Business. This is the ultimate sign-off on the industry’s embrace of the future, and its take-back of content control from trailblazers such as Google, Amazon and Yahoo. For some years now, various technology vendors have enabled publishers to deliver electronically formatted versions of their titles for special purposes. These have included applications such as conversions to XML formats (e.g., Publishing Dimensions), proprietary e-book reader formats (Mobipocket), sight-impaired applications (National