Through generous funding of the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, the Digital Public Library of America convened a two-day working meeting comprised of a diverse group of stakeholders to understand the current ecosystem for ebooks and unbundle pieces of this ecosystem to address the challenges ebooks present for libraries.

The Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust have had a strong relationship since DPLA’s inception in 2013. As part of our ongoing collaboration to host and make digitized books widely available, we are now working to see how we can provide our services to exciting new initiatives that bring ebooks to everyone.

At the DPLA, we are particularly enthusiastic about the role that our large and expanding national network of hubs can play. Many of our service hubs have already scanned books from their regions, and are generously sharing them through DPLA. Public domain works are being aggregated by content hubs such as HathiTrust, with more coming online every month. It is clear that we can bring these threads together to create a richer, broader tapestry of ebooks for readers of all ages and interests.

At its DPLAfest–taking place on October 24-25 in Boston—the Digital Public Library of America introduced a new way to browse over a million online books it has added to its collection. DPLA Bookshelf lets the user scroll a visual representation of a bookshelf that provides all the instantaneous power the digital world provides.

We recently spoke with Michael Kelley, executive editor of news and features for Library Journal, about current events in the library ebook market.

Amazon and OverDrive, the most prominent distributor of ebooks to libraries in the United States, will be teaming up to provide access to Amazon’s Kindle book collection for some 11,000 public and school libraries.