Penguin issued a statement today saying that they had restored their ebooks to libraries earlier this morning. They specifically pointed out that their titles can be checked out in the Kindle format. New releases from Penguin will still not be available at libraries.
On Monday, Penguin pulled all their ebooks from libraries citing security concerns.
Penguin said the following in their statement, “Amazon has undertaken to work with Penguin and Overdrive between now and the end of the year to address Penguin’s concerns. Penguin will, as a result, restore the supply of these titles until the end of the year in order to return the availability of older titles to all its digital customers.”
So it looks like Penguin signed an agreement with OverDrive about how their ebooks should be handled that Amazon did not know the details about. Since Amazon did not know about the details of the agreement, there was some missing piece that their Kindle did not include that Penguin requires in the agreement. That’s probably what caused Penguin to make the call to pull their ebooks.
Amazon then started talking with Penguin about adding some functionality to the Kindle and how it handles Penguins ebooks. That seemed to be enough to make Penguin happy and re-enable lending of their ebooks through libraries.
It’s great news that Penguin decided to re-enable their ebooks so quickly. It will be really interesting to see what specifically caused them to pull their ebooks in the first place.