From: Amy Schuler <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2015 09:53:41 -0400

Jim,

this won't help with your immediate needs, but at the Information
Infrastructure for New York (I2NY) Summit last spring, I learned of a
national e-book initiative- Library E-Content Access Project (or LEAP)
spearheaded by the New York Public Library and partners.  It sounds
like it aims to solve or alleviate some of the issues you are facing
and shortcomings of current e-book packages.  Here is an article I
found that basically summarizes what we heard at I2NY:

http://ascla.ala.org/interface/2015/03/new-york-public-library-leaping-into-the-library-ebook-future/

I have no idea what the current status is of this initiative; you
would have to contact Micah May.

Good luck!

Amy Schuler
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Millbrook, NY

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 6:36 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2015 10:28:53 -0700
>
> I had very few comments offline and none on-list to my request to
> identify e-book vendors we might find it easy and productive to work
> with.  Are there really no exciting choices out there?  With five
> campuses and tens of thousands of online degree candidates, we need to
> be able to deliver digital content as much as possible, but the
> present set of choices we see is unsustainable.
>
> And it's not getting any easier to buy print books -- quite the
> reverse, as I learned in a startlign experience last night.   Imagine
> that you want to buy a copy of Joyce's Ulysses.  You want a well-made
> paperback book, new from the publisher, with a reliably edited and
> proofread text.  There are a couple of oddities about editions of
> Ulysses and the work is now in the public domain.  You don't want the
> "original 1922 edition", which was fairly widely spread around for a
> while when it was supposedly public domain and the corrected edition
> was not; and you'd just as soon avoid the controversial 1980s Gabler
> edition.  You just want the real thing.
>
> You can duplicate this experiment by going to Amazon and searching for
> the book:  easy to do.  What you will find are dozens of pages of hits
> with a vast mishmash of dumped-to-digital e-books of dubious
> provenance, dumped-to-POD p-books equally dubious, secondhand copies
> of classic editions you recognize but can't be sure what condition
> they're in.  When I did the experiment, I gave up because I don't
> actually need a copy right now but because I genuinely could not find
> one that met my relatively simple criteria -- new, well-made, reliable
> edition.  This problem is one part "everybody's a publisher"
> superabundance of offerings, but it's another part Amazon's failure to
> pay heed to metadata.
>
> One example:  when you get a given title on Amazon, it generally lets
> you choose among Kindle, hardcover, paperback, and sometimes audiobook
> versions of the same book.  Time after time on the Ulysses pages, you
> will be given that choice, but the three or four versions whose tabs
> appear on the same screen turn out, when you click on a tab, to be
> *completely* different editions.  What looked like a possible
> contender for the paperback choice offered a "hardcover" tab that
> linked to an out-of-print edition by a completely different publisher.
>
> A reasonable person on this quest for the Joycean grail would give up
> and go look for a bookstore.  I was shocked.
>
> Jim O'Donnell/ASU