February Ebooks News from DPLA
At DPLA, ebook services are core to our commitment to a library-led digital future. And as we head to Nashville for PLA2020 this week, our ebooks team has been hard at work growing our ebooks offering, collaborating with state and public libraries on the adoption of Library Simplified and building new strategic partnerships.
We’re excited to share these additions to the DPLA Exchange, our ebook content platform:
- Audiobooks: That’s right, we’ve got audiobooks! We’ve added 15,000 titles from HarperCollins, Hachette, Scholastic and Blackstone Publishing, ranging from James Patterson’s latest thriller Lost to Ronan Farrow’s powerful new exposé Catch & Kill, with additional titles from Macmillan, Simon & Schuster and others coming soon.
- Non-English Titles: We’ve doubled our inventory of non-English titles, including nearly 40,000 new titles in Spanish.
- Flexible Licensing Terms: We are committed to offering libraries more and better licensing terms. Abrams Publishing is offering our partner libraries two licensing options: perpetual one-at-a-time or new 40-lends-up-to-10-at-a-time. And thanks to our recently announced partnership with BiblioLabs, we’ve added more than 16,000 titles that can be licensed for unlimited simultaneous use. Check out a sampling of their indie author collection here.
DPLA also helps libraries maximize access by providing the free Open Bookshelf collection, an aggregation of more than 6,000 freely available titles including classics, contemporary fiction and nonfiction, children’s books and textbooks, all of which are reviewed by our Curation Corps of librarians. Recently, we also have begun publishing our own easy-to-read ebook versions of important government documents for this collection, including the award-winning ebook version of the Mueller Report, and The Impeachment Papers, a compendium of documents, including witness testimony, related to the impeachment trial. These DPLA-published titles are provided for free to the public and to libraries.
At DPLA, all of our work is driven by collaboration and partnerships. We are proud to have strategic partnerships with LYRASIS, a national library service provider that hosts the LibrarySimplified ebook software; New York Public Library, the founding organization for Library Simplified; the Community Leadership Advisory Council working together to advance Library Simplified; and, most recently, BiblioLabs, which provides simultaneous use perpetual access content to libraries.
Of course, none of this important work happens by itself: Micah May, who has been managing our ebook program on a part-time basis for the last three years is now leading it full-time as our new Director of Ebook Services. Micah comes to DPLA from New York Public Library, where he served as Director of Strategy and then Senior Director of Business Development and Innovation. In his new role, Micah will continue to collaborate with libraries and publishers to advance our ebook work nationally. Michele Kimpton leads the Community Leaders Council on Library Simplified, and is the Director of Business Development and Strategy at DPLA and Jill Blades leads outreach for our ebooks work.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about this news, and we hope you’ll be part of our next steps. Please reach out if you’d like to meet up at PLA2020, and mark your calendars for the LYRASIS + DPLA + NYPL Reception on Thursday, February 27th from 4:30-6:30pm at the Mellow Mushroom, 423 Broadway, Nashville.
If you’re interested in finding out more, please sign up for our newsletter here, get more information on our website, or email us at ebooks@dp.la.
DPLA’s ebook work is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.