15 May 2007

Inter-library loan, new style

The National Research Council Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information and MyiLibrary, the e-book aggregator owned by Ingram Digital Group, have formed a partnership to launch a new service called eBook Loans. The service provides an interlibrary loans model for academic e-books, and includes electronic books from scholarly publishers including Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Blackwell and Springer.

According to the various press releases, each e-book loan will cost US$25, payable online using a credit card. Users will be given 30 days access to an e-book through a URL received in an e-mail immediately after paying. After 30 days this link expires automatically. Hence libraries will reduce their loan administration and costs of physical couriers.  Publishers should also benefit from this new source of revenue, while users will gain instant access to books that they need. Given the e-format, I think the service would be more useful if it were for academic articles rather than entire books, but if your research involves reading sections of books rather than the whole thing, and your institutional librarian has a credit card or will refund your own for this purpose, not too bad.

15 May 2007 19:20:00 | Libraries

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