The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) today welcomes four library and civic leaders to our board of directors: Joshua Frazier-Sparks, Director of Culture, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Walmart; Joseph Lucia, Dean of Libraries at Temple University; Marcia Walker-McWilliams, Executive Director of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium and Kelvin Watson, Executive Director of Las Vegas-Clark County Library District

Yesterday we shared the news that we and our partners at LYRASIS have created The Palace Project to develop and scale a robust suite of content, services, and tools for the delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media to benefit public libraries and patrons. The Palace Project is made possible by a generous $5 million award by Knight Foundation.

A powerful partnership of industry leaders today announced The Palace Project, a transformational, library-centered platform for digital content and services. The Palace Project, with a $5 million investment by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for LYRASIS, and in strategic partnership with Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), will develop and scale a robust suite of content, services, and tools for the delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media to benefit public libraries and patrons.

DPLA is offering opportunities for library professionals and students to join our Curation Corps. The DPLA Curation Corps is a group of librarians and information professionals who help to curate our Open Bookshelf offering of public domain and other freely accessible ebooks, as well as assist in creating books for DPLA’s ebook projects. DPLA relies on the expertise of the library community to create collections patrons will love. Curation Corps tasks and working sessions vary depending on current project needs. Open Bookshelf is generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Last week we shared the news that DPLA has signed an agreement with Amazon Publishing to bring their ebooks and audiobooks to the DPLA Exchange, our not-for-profit, library-centered ebooks marketplace.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that we have signed an agreement with Amazon Publishing to make all of the approximately 10,000 Amazon Publishing ebooks and audiobooks available to libraries and their patrons through the DPLA Exchange, the only not-for-profit, library-centered content marketplace. This marks the first time that ebooks from Amazon Publishing have been made available to libraries. Like our previous publisher arrangements, this agreement furthers our mission to expand equitable access to ebooks and audiobooks while protecting library patron privacy.

DPLA’s ebooks program serves our mission of maximizing access to digital content by giving libraries across the country greater control over their acquisition and delivery of ebooks and audiobooks

We are pleased to invite you to join us at the inaugural DPLA Book Talk, which will feature a conversation between Mistrust author Ethan Zuckerman and Wikimedia Foundation CEO and DPLA board member Katherine Maher, moderated by Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibargüen.

With expanded vaccine access, many of us have begun to conceive of what our post-Covid worlds might look like. These visions are necessarily colored by all that we have learned during the last year—from the benefits of flexible working arrangements to the urgent need to finally dismantle systemic racism in our work.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce that we are now offering an ebook creation service to libraries. This new service, provided in partnership with Digital Divide Data (DDD), gives libraries the ability to easily and affordably digitize and reformat texts to create ebooks in EPUB format from print materials that are in the public domain or for which the library owns the copyright.

Digital Public Library of America is pleased to announce that we are beginning production on the publication of a new ebook, tentatively titled By the Quill of Her Pen: Black Suffragists in Their Own Words. This new DPLA-published ebook will be a collection of 20-30 letters, diary entries, and accompanying photographs and biographical information that […]

I am pleased to share that you now can find more than half a million ebooks and audiobooks from over 1,000 publishers on the newly redesigned DPLA Exchange, the only library-owned ebook and audiobook marketplace.

A Wikimedia project update, upcoming events, hub network news, and more

Under the leadership of director Michael Blackwell, St. Mary’s County Library in Maryland has been an active participant in DPLA’s ebook work. We talked with Michael about his library’s experience with SimplyE, and how it’s helped to maximize access for patrons in St. Mary’s County.

Join us on Friday, January 15, 2021, at 2 pm ET for our next Community + Open Board meeting. We’ll be hosting Reckoning with Our Pasts and Building Our Futures, a community conversation about the work to be done to live up to our common commitments to equity and inclusion in 2021 and beyond, as […]

Last week DPLA hosted our first (virtual) holiday reception. It was a risk– none of us had ever been to a virtual holiday reception before, and we weren’t sure exactly what we would do, or even if anyone would come. But with the encouragement of some of our friends (thanks, Keila!), we took that risk, and ended up with a gathering of more than 40 public librarians, college and middle school educators, technologists and funders. We were joined by DPLA founders, longtime collaborators, and people whom we only met this year. I was reminded of the value of taking risks; the collective effort that is DPLA is itself a risk. And I was struck, as I have been so many times this year, by the breadth, dedication, and resilience of the extended DPLA community. With that in mind, I wanted to reflect on some of our achievements this year.

DPLA’s Open Bookshelf is a collection of more than 8,000 free ebooks that includes a wide range of titles from classics to children’s books to textbooks, and everything in between. Anyone can get instant access—no registration required— at freebooks.dp.la or by using the free SimplyE app and choosing “Digital Public Library of America” as your […]

As we look back on the ups and downs of our own year at DPLA, we wanted to share with you some information about how the 1.5 million people who visited dp.la this year used our resources:

News emerged this week that, as part of DPLA’s work to expand access to digital materials, we have been in talks with Amazon Publishing about making their titles available to libraries through the DPLA Exchange. While these are just talks at this point, I wanted to take a moment to provide an update on this […]

All the latest news from DPLA, plus upcoming events, and more.