Public Libraries

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New York Public Library has 75,000 ebooks

The New York Public Library is the largest public library in the United States with over 6 million items in its physical collections.  Did you know they also offer the largest digital collection in the country with over 75,000 copies and more than 35,000 titles available for borrowing?  It’s especially impressive since Amazon has a competing program that allows you to borrow an ebook directly from Amazon.com without having to go to a library.  The list of borrowable Kindle Owners’ Lending Library ebooks only shows about 5,000 titles that you can download directly from Amazon to your Kindle.  So the NYPL currently has that beat by about 30,000 titles.    You can find and checkout all those ebooks at ebooks.nypl.org.

Those numbers are almost definitely going to go up as downloads of ebooks from their site grew 82 percent over the last year.  And all that growth happened before the Amazon Kindle Fire launched on Monday.  Over five million of the tablets had been pre-ordered so that’s a lot more people with an ereader in their hands.

No doubt many of those people will be clamoring for a wider selection of ebooks to be available at their local library.  It will be exciting to see how much the digital offerings grow at the largest library in the country now that the largest seller of ebooks has launched their own tablet.

Comments

  2. Pride goeth before a fall. I suspect most of those 35,000 titles are out-of-copyright items passed through NYPL’s Overdrive service, long available via Project Gutenberg and others. And, in keeping with Overdrive’s distribution limitations, most of the titles that aren’t from there have long waiting lists.

    Amazon’s Lending Library is the tip of Amazon’s iceberg. Watch it grow. And watch it overcome the stingy Overdrive/Public Library model that is driving eReaders to distraction.

    Authors want readers and readers want eBooks. If our libraries can’t supply them and our publishers won’t (and today they can’t and won’t), then someone will.

    Unless publishers and libraries get together to forge a sane borrowing model, they are both flirting with obsolescence. I discuss this issue at length, including my own suggestion for that sane borrowing model.