Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library lets subscribers to its £49-per-year Amazon Prime delivery service borrow one free book a month from the 200,000 volume collection, although it contains few recent bestsellers.
Other services have yet to make much of a mark. Afictionado launched in 2011, promising ebook loans at a set subscription rate, but its website has since been pulled down and we couldn’t reach anyone at the company.
The attraction of public libraries is that they’re freely available and the content is chosen by trained staff who have the public in mind
Eskoobe is a similar “streaming” book service, but so far it’s only launched in Germany. There’s also Read Petite, backed by Tim Waterstone, the founder of the eponymous bookstore chain, whose subscriptions are limited to short stories and articles, while F+W Media offers ebook subscriptions for specific topics, such as art or romance novels.
Even if paid-for libraries are a success, they won’t trouble public ones, argues Stopforth.
“The attraction of public libraries is that they’re freely available and the content is chosen by trained staff who have the public in mind,” he says. “A business operation will be different – it will come from commercial concerns and operate differently. I can’t see a business model that would threaten the public model.”
Future of libraries
Even if the model of public book-lending isn’t under threat, what about the physical library buildings? If we can borrow books online without making the trek to the local library, will they cease to exist?
Libraries are already suffering budget cuts and closures, and a shift to digital lending could further erode the business case for maintaining a possibly lucrative plot of land in the town centre.
Stopforth says there’s a case for having a nationwide ebook lending library, which people could access online without having to visit their local library.
“It hasn’t happened previously because of each library’s local requirements to tailor a service to the population,” he says. “A digital service kind of bypasses that… that’s part of a vision for a longer term. I can see there would be a will for that, but then it’s about getting the infrastructure in place.”
The Sieghart review concluded that libraries will be under even greater threat if they don’t shift to digital.
“Whatever analysis you make about the impact of remote digital borrowing on the physical footfall in libraries, it’s plain that an inability to offer digital lending will make libraries increasingly irrelevant in a relatively short time,” the report says. “Library services, therefore, do not have the luxury of waiting any longer to expand, or in many cases start, their provision of digital lending, and to link it to a broader digital strategy that meets the increasingly advanced technological expectations of many library members.”
It’s plain that an inability to offer digital lending will make libraries increasingly irrelevant in a relatively short time
Indeed, OverDrive’s Burleigh suggests that many libraries have seen membership increase after starting to offer ebooks, and that digital services help extend their reach to more people in the local community.
Plus, as he and others note, there’s more to libraries than borrowing the latest Dan Brown novel.
“We believe libraries are a core part of the community, and continue to be – they play a very important community centre role,” says Burleigh, noting that they offer internet access, career development and other resources.
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