>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:16 >> Michelle Bickert: Thank you everybody for joining us today and for moving down closer to the front. We really appreciate it and are happy to enjoy you and see if you're really, really excited or if you maybe make it easier to throw tomatoes at us. I don't know. I hope everybody's having a good DPLA Fest so far. Whoo! We are here to talk to you today and give you an update on library ebook platforms. As some of you may remember from last year we were able to do a really intensive ebook workshop thanks to generous funding from the [inaudible] Foundation. And a lot of good work came out of that. I think most importantly I got hired, so hold your applause. And so I wanted to give you at least a quick update on where we are, and then introduce my colleagues who will talk more of the state of ebooks and libraries more broadly. So where are we now a year after DPLA Fest 2015? I've got a couple of our projects that DPLA has been working on up there. Open Ebooks has been mentioned I know quite a few times today and we're going to talk about it even more as we go through. And I'm sure that Micah's probably going to talk about that as well. I'll just mention briefly what DPLA's role has been in Open Ebooks as a partner. We put together a curation core of the nation's top school librarians, librarians working with youth, and they curated the 6,000 books that we have available in Open Ebooks. They were able to take those publisher donations and pick out what it is that students really want as well as reflect the diversity. We also run the social media for it, we help convene the community conversations around it, we're helping to lead conversations around accessibility in ebooks, and try to improve even more some of that native functionality that comes through ePUB and working with Readium. And we really see that all of the press that's been around Open Ebooks as an opportunity to help further some of these initiatives in the ebook community. And DPLA is helping to lead that conversation along with our partners NYPL and First Books. Also, I have up there a little graphic for LEAP, the Library eContent Access Project, which is funded by IMLS. And DPLA's role in that is to be the, again, the community convener. We're trying to figure out what our role is in ebooks again as we've worked in the past year, and so we're helping to organize the conversations that are going to go around creating a library-owned marketplace which again Micah's going to talk to a bit more later. With that idea though, and DPLA organizing these community conversations, we're also working on a sort of broader ebook working group, a broader ebook community, and this came out of the conversations last year. So how can we create an umbrella for everybody who's working in ebooks to come together and share all of their information, share what they're working on? We want to be able to streamline the effort. If somebody in Massachusetts is working with a publisher and somebody in Texas is working with a publisher how can we make sure that they're connecting with each other and talking about what [inaudible] they were able to make with content. We had some great discussions over the last week for those of us who were able to join at the Public Library Association as well as some of us got together yesterday as the LEAP partners, and are really trying to see where we all fit in there. And I think that those conversations are going really well. I also have a little graphic down there. DPLA has about two million items that are categorized as books within our site, and we're looking at how we can open up that content. And there's going to be a whole session right after this talking about how we can try to open up the content that our hubs have and turn those into accessible ebooks. So I'll just quickly add going back to what I said about the ebook working group, we want voices to get involved. We want people to feel that they have a community that they can come into and talk about ebooks, learn more, be connected with the resources that they need for their library. So we have up here on the screen a couple of different places where you can look to get involved. We're still sort of figuring out what our best options are going to be. We've got a Google Plus community, a working group listserv and a Wiki page that posts our findings, our final products. I would recommend going again to the dp.la website, Get Involved, Ebooks. We're really trying to get this to bubble up and making it easier for you all to connect. So please just get in touch with me if you know that you want to be involved, if it's a conversation that you want to be part of and I can make sure that you are plugged in. I'm Michelle. You can find me on the DPLA website. Our emails are pretty easy. So with that I'll introduce my colleagues who are here to give you an update from their world of ebooks. We have Christine Peterson who is the Amigos eShelf Manager for Amigos Library Services in Texas. Greg Pronevitz. Oops, you guys switched seats, spots on me. Greg Pronevitz on the end there who is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Library System. And Micah May who is the Director of Business Development for the New York Public Library. And with that I'll pass it over to Christine. ^M00:05:40 ^M00:05:47 >> Christine Peterson: Thanks for coming. I am Chris Peterson. I'm the Project Manager or Program Manager for Amigos eShelf Project. But fortunately or unfortunately I'm not here to talk to you about our project. Talk to me afterwards. Okay? No laughter? No nothing? ^M00:06:02 [ Laughter ] ^M00:06:05 Okay. So my role today is actually not to talk to you about us but to give you a little bit of history, to give you the library-created platforms that went before us and where they are right now. But first I want to give you the three reasons that libraries started doing this. And it really goes down to Douglas County which I will talk about a little bit more in detail. There were three reasons that Douglas County decided to create their own instead of continue with the commercial vendors. The first was the loss of ownership of the titles that they were subscribing to at the time. Also, the increased price. There was a specific incidence with OverDrive that really turned the corner for them. And the third was the requirement of their patrons having to learn yet another user interface. And with all three of those things they decided we can do this. And so I'm going to start with Douglas County who's our first. Douglas County decided to integrate their ebooks into their ILS, the one you're looking at right here. I have about a minute per here so I'm going to move through these pretty quickly. They were the first ones that said, "You know, we can do this." And they went to IMLS and they were fortunate enough to get an IMLS grant to help fund this change. They did decide to do what we all claim we want to do which is try to bring everything together instead of having silos and they were able to bring everything together within their ILS. Of course, they had technical resources to be able to back that up. So the question is where are they right now. Oh, by the way, everything they did was open source. If you go to the Evoke--e, v, o, k, e-- website you will get everything you need to know to do this for yourself. I do want to tell you that where they are now is kind of questionable. Actually it's probably not really questionable. They are not moving forward. There have been a number of staffing changes at Douglas County particularly in the administrative area, and their focus has been moved to something else. Now I say that telling you that they still have a server, an Adobe content server, sitting there and it is still working. They have not yet turned it off but they are not moving forward with it. I also want to make mention here that when they created this they created it without web-based ordering. I'll come back to that explaining why that's important. Right after that, well, within a year after that, Marmot, which is a consortium that includes Douglas County, it's a multi-type library consortium in Colorado, they decided to move forward on this. And they created their own. Now they're a consortium so they were not just dealing with a single library at this point. They decided to use View Find, which is an open source discovery system, as their interface. So they already had an existing ILS but they used View Find as that discovery piece. So that when they added the ebooks they were also doing the same thing as Douglas County they were just doing it the different way. Douglas County used their ILS, Marmot used the View Find interface. So they already had a very robust ILS that was going. They went ahead and included ebooks. They also integrated ebooks with other resources. They are not just dealing with OverDrive. They deal with multiple ebook aggregators and they bring all of that in to one. They do an incredible job there. They also upgraded the View Find functionality so much that it forked. So now you have View Find Plus and you have the View Find Community versions. They also have decided not to move forward with the ebook side of this with the platform side. Mainly because they're changing their focus, and into other types of functionality. Now the interesting thing is their Adobe content server sits at Douglas County. They share that server. So as long as Douglas County's server is up Marmot is still up but they're just not doing anything with the service. I don't believe, last time I heard there was not a timeframe for Douglas County to take that server down but I would imagine in the next year it might be down. ^M00:10:06 Marmot is right now starting to move those ebooks that they purchased on to other commercial platforms that they have access to. Taking a little bit out of, I was trying to do from oldest to newest but I want to continue with Colorado. This is probably one of the newer projects. This is the Evoke 2.0 Project. And the reason Colorado did this was because of the lack of web-based ordering which made it really difficult for the smaller libraries to be able to join. Too much time, they didn't have the resources to do it. So they went back to IMLS and got a grant to actually create an end-to-end solution which included not only web-based ordering but also included a really nice interface. It was a compliment to the projects that had already been going on in Colorado. And they did do this, they got an agreement with Odilo and Odilo went ahead and changed their software to do this. Unfortunately it was never implemented. So it sits in Colorado and right now it sits at the Colorado State Library. To this point nothing has been done with it. That doesn't mean that something won't be. But right now it's been a year, maybe a little bit more, that the software hasn't been used. So we don't know where this one is going. We'll see. I know that there's a lot of interest at the Colorado State Library to do something with it and to be part of the ebook work that's being done. The next group that came forward was sorry, was Califa, sorry about that. Califa is a consortium out of California. It's a public library consortium. And they are the third. So we have Douglas County, we have Marmot and then we have Califa. And all of these people I'm talking about, you know those of us who came after stand on the shoulders of these people. I mean they did incredible work. They did incredible time, experience, money that went into this so even though I'm telling you that some of these projects have stopped that doesn't mean that we don't still value the work that they did, and that continues with Califa. So they are a consortium. There are multiple ILSs there that they work through and with. They use the View Find interface that Marmot has created. They also started out with a single-shared collection and now they have moved to not only a single-shared collection but also collections for each library. You might notice that I have a note up there that the Kansas State Library is part of Califa. And so those of you who are in the know know that there was an issue between Califa, I mean, sorry, Kansas State Library and OverDrive when OverDrive upped their cost by 700% the result of that was Kansas pulled their books out, and they are now a Califa member. So there was an interesting story behind that. So where is Califa right now? Califa is moving forward. My gosh, yes. You don't want to get in front of Califa because they're going to run you over. So there's a lot going on, and there's Paula right there. You know, right there. So Califa is moving forward. Now the key right here you might notice that there's no web-based ordering. And I say that there's no web-based ordering yet, because Califa is looking into ways to bring that in. And, again, if you have that it makes it easier for a library to be able to use the service. So then I move on to ours and I wish I could spend an hour here but I won't. I'll spend just a couple of minutes. We were next. We were the fourth ones. And because we stand on the shoulders of everybody else what did we include? We included web-based ordering. So this is just a real quick view of that. We are a multi-type consortium. We span, historically, we span six states. When we decided to do this we decided that choice was our, flexibility in choice is what we're looking for. So when libraries come to us they choose where they want these ebooks to show up, we have interlibrary loan agreements with almost all the publishers. We're looking at multiple licensing agreements. I mean, there's a lot of things that we're doing mainly because we're straddling both public and academic school and special. So where are we headed? We are, can I say right behind Califa, or right with Califa. I mean, yeah, we're moving forward as well. The next one is the Montana State Library. I did not even know they were doing anything. I'm so embarrassed, until about six or seven months ago. But Montana, and the reason I didn't know is because Montana was doing it internally and it took them a long time to do it. There were a lot of technical challenges. They didn't have a lot of staff. They didn't have a lot of money. But they wanted to see if they could do it. So they did a pilot project and their authentication came just through SIP. They didn't do any other authentication. They're dealing primarily with ebooks that are about Montana or written by Montana authors. There's nothing really happening with it right now. It is up and running. They have 30 titles which tells you it's a pilot. They are looking to broaden that or possibly to become part of LEAP, or to look at Califa or Amigos. But they are looking to see how they can become part of this conversation. Whether it is to keep what they've got or to hook onto somebody else. The next one I have is Pennsylvania. There are two libraries--Oil City and Meadville public libraries, which are about 30 miles apart in Pennsylvania. Meadville has a tradition of using open source. They were one of the first [inaudible] libraries, and they do a lot of open source there, and they give back to the community. And they looked at this one and they said, "We can do this. We're going to do it as a pilot." And their hope was that the Pennsylvania State Library would look at it and take it on. That was the hope. You might notice that it says "Ready to test with libraries." They originally gave themselves six months to do it. Sixteen months later they're starting to test. Let me just say it takes a little bit longer than you think. So this was built as a proof of concept and they have two publishers. They brought in Gutenberg and they brought in ABDO. So they are also up and running. We'll see where they go. The last one that I have here is Connecticut. Although Connecticut's not a platform, Connecticut is important because they were given $2 million to build a platform, or possibly to support a platform. So there's a really good story behind this. I don't have time to give you, but LJ has an excellent story about how this all worked. And you would all smile at how the state process works. But they are now looking, and they are intimately involved in the LEAP project. So we'll probably see them come out with something. The last big thing I do want to mention is the National Ebook Platform and that's kind of LEAP, sorry, that's kind of what LEAP is. I just want to say here that we are not sure what this is yet. This is still a continuing discussion of what this might be but the idea is it might be nice to have a single place run by libraries or run by a non-profit that could bring down costs. It could reflect the values that we have when it comes to licensing and how we deal with ebooks. So we're looking forward to seeing where this one goes. And I want to end this just by saying that those of who are as old as I do and you remember going from manual card catalogs to computers, and those who remember internet coming and you remember CDs going out, this is another transition we're in. And as frustrating as it is it is an exciting time to be part of this. So I just want to leave you with that. All of us who work in this ebooks space, and we hope that you guys will join us, we're all very excited about what's coming. There's a lot of different projects out there and they are doing a lot of different things. And who knows where it's going to end up. But it's a great time to be involved. And with that I'll let, let's see, is it your turn? It's all yours. ^M00:18:00 [ Clapping ] ^M00:18:06 >> Greg Pronevitz: Thanks Christine. Can you hear me in the back there? Okay. I can't really see if [inaudible]. I'm Greg Pronevitz, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Library System. And I'm here to talk about a survey that I distributed but it was developed in collaboration with Michelle from DPLA, Valerie Horton from Minitex, and Veronda Pitchford from Rails where we're gearing up to do a presentation at ALA Orlando. And this is sort of the preliminary look at our survey results. I presented results of an earlier survey at a Minitex webinar last year. And if anyone's interested in seeing that my email address is up here. I'd be happy to send you the link for that. So first of all we had 35 respondents to the survey. And I only have 10 minutes to talk about them today so it won't be comprehensive. But if you have a consortial ebook platform or program that you would like to be included in future surveys please get in touch with me and we'll get you a survey. In our survey of the 35 respondents four of them had either national or multi-state reach. Twenty of them were statewide programs of one way, shape or form. And 11 of them were regional programs. This map, I decided to put in a political statement. What I see here is both conventions become contested, Trump and Bernie switch sides, and here's what we get. But really this is the red states are statewide ebook projects that are not OverDrive. ^M00:20:08 The blue states are statewide ebook projects that are OverDrive. And statewide is taken very loosely, 90% availability. The black states I don't believe have statewide projects or did not respond to my surveys. Missouri and Virginia both have multiple statewide projects. Here's what the 2014 survey and the 2015 survey look like. The one on the right is the newer one with more red and I added one blue in Ohio that I learned about. Of these consortia some of them gave enough demographics that I could talk about their primary focus either public, academic or multi-type. None of them were primarily K-12 or primarily special. The participating libraries were chiefly K through 12 with well over 2,500, public with about 2,500, academic in the 500 range. This is a total aggregate not any one. Total number of libraries participating is over 5,700. The tiny number of 13 special or other libraries often included a state library. The population served reported by those who reported populations served total 58 million population. So these consortial ebook projects really have a lot of reach. I did a little scattergram of when these projects began and of those reported you can see they're really bunched up around 2011 through 2013 there were a lot started. And one started this year. So congratulations. We asked our colleagues about publisher agreements and three of the projects talked about having more than 100 publisher agreements each. Amigos, [inaudible] and Techshare. And those libraries and others that were interested in it all felt that the trend of working directly with publishers was on the rise. ^M00:22:40 ^M00:22:46 We asked folks about which aggregators they're using. OverDrive was the big one. And this survey certainly didn't include every single OverDrive consortium out there by any stretch of the imagination. So the local OverDrive users will probably grow way beyond this once we get a wider reach with the survey. EBSCO came in second in this case. Netlibrary was mentioned specifically in a couple of cases. Baker and Taylor were next. BiblioBoard, Bibliotheca or 3M, EBL and TotalBoox all came in with two And then there were six others that were just a sprinkling of this that and the other thing. We asked respondents about licensing uniqueness, and this was their own opinion about what was unique about things. And one of the things that we noticed in our own program in Massachusetts, we have a Baker and Taylor agreement with statewide access, and we found that Baker and Taylor really helped us open the door to some Big Five publishers that weren't available when we started. Unlimited use of recorded books in BiblioBoard were other interesting features. We asked folks about what kind of unique content they had and they listed languages or literacy in some local content. Other data, of the groups that reported about 900,000 total unique titles are available among them. I don't have the number of how many actually reported but it certainly wasn't 35. And of the ones that reported annual spending it totaled $10 million. And that, again, was just a small percentage of respondents. Not everybody did that. We need to get a better handle on that, too. The funding formulas that these groups use to gather contributions from either state funding, grant funding, local funding really varied. There's no way to really report a trend in that at this point. So I wanted to talk about some of the conclusions from the comments that people made during this. And one of the common themes in "What was your vision for your project" and the theme common throughout all of that was expanding access to more content for more patrons. The challenges that people were dealing with were meeting holds, the costs to meet the holds demand, collection development and weeding to stay fresh, and expanding content to new lending models and genres. The opportunities that I see as a result of this survey and the work that we've been doing in Massachusetts and the past DPLA Fests, and many discussions that have gone on over the past few years are really embodied in the IMLS grants that are out there now to support a national digital platform. SimplyE that went to New York public library and a large number of partners. The LEAP grant that I'm sure Micah will talk about in detail that we're a partner on and many of you are partners on. And the SimplyE for consortia which was granted to Minitex with a large number of partners to develop an app for consortia to provide much enhanced discovery check out and ease of reading, simplicity. So I think our opportunity now is to really take advantage of the economies of scale. Of the few that reported $10 million in spending it's got to be double or triple that from what I'm guessing. And if we can put our buying power together, put our technical development power together that we can really go places with discoverability and simplicity. And I thank you very much. ^M00:27:30 [ Clapping ] ^M00:27:38 >> Micah May: Thank you Greg and Christine. I feel like that's a perfect set up for what's next for me. And I have the luxury of talking mostly about specific problems that I've been interested in, projects I've been working on. And I guess before I dive into that I guess let me thank these folks, and very personally, because I think what Christine said about building and standing on the shoulders of the projects from before us is absolutely true. And it's very much true of these projects that I've helped to conceive and drive. And I think specifically Greg and Christine are two of those shoulders. So I met most of the partners and found out they work in ebooks because of the call that Christine would convene amongst people doing ebook work. And so very literally I found the other people doing this work through her. And similarly Greg has been a constant voice and advocate for me to do this in a big-scaled way that has I think been one of the most powerful voices saying, "We're approaching this right." So I think that as we think about what's next in this space, in my mind it is time for a transition. And I think the projects that Christine gave a really nice history of were groundbreaking, and they were powerful, and they proved that we can do it. And I think that was a really important thing for libraries to go do and prove. But I think they also proved something else which is that they demonstrated that this is work that just screams for scale. Once you build these capacities you should share them because it's very easy to reuse them and to share them. And so I think that we are benefitting from the lessons learned from those projects in that the projects that I'm going to talk about have been conceived in a way that beg-scaling from the very beginning. And I said this at PLA last week I'm going to start saying it every time I talk about this I think we are talking precisely about building components of a national digital platform for libraries. This is precisely that. And we're starting with ebooks. And I think this will show that we have the capacity to build capabilities that can very quickly expand beyond ebooks. And I would say even this year we're likely to be able to handle things like audio And it will very quickly be clear that this is not about ebooks, this is about delivering library content to patrons on library-owned infrastructure. So this is in my mind a first foray into building the national digital platform for libraries. And I think that's how we should conceive of it. So I want to give another shout out as I start this to ReadersFirst. I think the work that our projects have done would not have been possible without the tremendously successful advocacy work of ReadersFirst to open up ebook content and provide interoperability between those platforms so that you can serve it in a library-owned environment. ^M00:30:13 So Michael Blackwell who's in the fourth row here, you want to give a wave, has I think been one of many leaders that have stepped up, and are really helping to rejuvenate or double-down on ReadersFirst, and the promise of interoperability that it offers. And I think that both Greg and Christine hit on something very powerful which is the idea that our, you know, while we are small institutions in some cases, even NYPL compared to the Goliaths of the technology world that we sometimes hold ourselves up against, collectively we can be very powerful. And I think ReadersFirst showed that when really just a small percentage of these distributors' clients started saying, "This is our content and we should own it. And we want the ability to take it out and take the [inaudible] out and serve it to users in an interoperable way that supports a high quality of service." And that principled stand worked incredibly quickly so that whereas in 2012 these distributors just refused to give us APIs, we now have high-functioning APIs out of all the major public library ebook distributors. And I think the next phase of this work, one of the most important things we can do is build on that success and apply that same principle and approach to the rest of the library world so that we can extend some successes we've had focused primarily around public circulating libraries to also benefit academic and school libraries and special libraries as well. And I think that ReadersFirst offers us a model and a vehicle, in part, I think there are many organizations that can and should contribute to this to continue to move that forward and give libraries the raw materials they need in order to own their service. And that really starts with interoperability. And so I think that's a critical underpinning of all of this work. So with that I'm going to start by, I mean most of you know these projects so I'm going to try to move through it quickly. As you probably know the grant in 2012 that was awarded by the IMLS to create the Library Simplified Project now named SimplyE as the product that came out of that has been I think, you know, we've been working hard for three years. My colleague and partner in this, James English, who's the Product Owner for that is also here and has built a beautiful simple ebook reading experience which has now been released. The first instance of that is the Open Ebooks App that Michelle mentioned. And that is also now available to libraries to start using. And my hope is that this year we'll see many deployments across library worlds and this will start to become very real. So that's ready in the sense that the technology is up, it's working, it's proving to be very scalable in Open Ebooks implementation. And it is designed to be open source and is inexpensive as possible for libraries to deploy. And the first step in them beginning to take ownership of their relationship with their patrons. And I guess sort of philosophically I'd like to emphasize that that's why we started here. It is the app through which people read. It is the primary mechanism for discovery. It's the touch point where we interact with our patrons. And what we wanted to start with is the assertion that these patrons are our patrons, our customers and our relationships. And our vendors sometimes would like to both sell us content and own that relationship. And I think we have begun to reject that and say, "If a library chooses to provide these services through a vendor-hosted offering then that is fine if it's the libraries choice." But that cannot be our only option. We as libraries have the right and the need to have the interoperability that supports us in serving libraries in an environment we own and we control. And I think SimplyE is the vehicle for that right now. So it allows us both to merge all of our ebook content from multiple distributors into one place so that we can rationalize it and put it all in one place, which in turns allows us to free our procurement decisions of the user experience so that we can buy from whomever gives us the best deal whenever we want, and that will drive competition in the market. And I think in some ways even more exciting and powerful than what SimplyE can do today is what it's going to be able to do to tomorrow, which is that because we own it we can do what want with it. If libraries want to come together and say that it's really critical to be able to ingest an API feed about programs we're running in our branches so that we can have push marketing and there's a pop-up in your ereader saying, "We're running our program in a branch five blocks from you. In half an hour please come join." That's something that we can fully build now because this is our experience and we own it. This is providing library service through library-owned channels which I think is really the point of all of this work. So briefly, specifically, SimplyE right now today can integrate through middleware collections that libraries own and host on the three major existing library vendors--3M Bibliotheca, Baker and Taylor, and OverDrive, the BiblioBoards or Biblio [inaudible] API is within weeks of being finished. And then that, too, this year will be able to be integrated. And so we continue to have more and more content that we can roll into one better comprehensive experience. And I'd like to go back to Greg's slide about the other ebook platforms. I think we've really turned a corner in the last three years in that as I talk to other distributors, so EBSCO is a standout example of this, they were second on Greg's slide, they're many state libraries, many consortia and many individual libraries who own ebook collections through EBSCO. Now EBSCO does not yet have a content API so it would be impossible to merge their content into anything but their app. But in conversations with them in the last month it's been clear to me that we're in a very different place. So in 2012 these distributors refused to build the APIs. And we were trying to beat and bludgeon and negotiate, and we still kind of failed. And then we started ReadersFirst with others that had the same experience, the demand access to our content. We're not there anymore. So if you talk to EBSCO they will tell you that they're perfectly open to building a content API. They plan to do it and they're willing to build to our spec so that we can make these interoperable. And that is an example of this ReadersFirst application that is the underpinning to be able to doing any of this work. So I think one of the most important thing that libraries are interested in this and need to do is to start talking to their vendors and their providers about the importance of interoperability. And even if it's going to take your library another year or two or three to roll out these platforms you can help right now by underscoring with your budget to your vendors the importance of interoperability, philosophically, fundamentally which will do nothing but open options for you as a library and for other libraries. And to Greg's survey and the point about the financial power of libraries, even just within the 20 partners named on the LEAP grant there's 28 million in econtent spent. And so nationally we know that this number is hundreds of millions. So it is a substantial market. And we are spending a lot of money. And so if we can speak with a unified voice about what we want we can change that market. And we can start saying to our vendors that interoperability is table steaks. It's not an extra, it is what we require. When we buy content it's ours and we want the ability and the right to serve it in the best environment for our users, and in an environment that lets us control that. So the next series in this project was LEAP, the Library eContent Access Project, which you've all heard a lot about. This is basically the effort to go further and build a backend to this system that would be a library-owned marketplace, a library-centric marketplace and distributor. So this is the whole right-hand side of the six-part stack at the bottom of this page. I think this can be built and up, hopefully, in a pilot version this calendar year. So we're going to try to push very quickly. Again, building on Christine's point, we're learning from what others have done that started before us. And so we're conceiving this right out of the gate as a national platform. Every library in the country will be free and we will encourage them over time to enter and buy through this marketplace. We'll start with ebooks but we'll quickly move to other things. We will continue to follow and pursue the ReadersFirst principles of loosely coupled architecture that gives libraries options. I think this offers a clear win-win for publishers because to the degree it can save libraries money that would have otherwise gone to the distributors we will all reinvest it in content. And publishers recognize that and I think are eager for a library-owned option in the marketplace. And we want this to be as decentralized as possible. So we hope that as we work, and this is already very much starting, we will build close collaborations and that this although being incubated right now in New York Public Library I think we are already in deep partner relationships with a number of you. In fact, many of the successful programs on a regional basis we're already in deep conversations about bringing them into formal governance roles and sharing with them in the incubation of LEAP. And that includes the Montana Library Association that Christine talked about, Califa and also the Denver Library that carried the Evoke Project forward. So I think I'm out of time. So I guess I'll skip this and let you ask questions about it if you'd like. But I do think there's a number of ways you can help. And I think you're probably here because you have questions or something to say about this. So we'd love to hear what that is and have a discussion about how we can all move ebooks forward in libraries. Thank you. ^M00:39:22 [ Clapping ] ^M00:39:30 >> Michelle Bickert: Is this working? Can you hear me? Okay. Apparently this has been on the entire time so it's a good thing I didn't say anything embarrassing. So we only have about five minutes left in this session. As Micah mentioned if any of you are coming to the reception afterwards you can find me or Micah or Rachel, we have several other colleagues who are here who can talk to Open Ebooks or LEAP in some capacity. We're happy to help connect you with them. So we'll take a couple of questions with our time left. ^M00:39:57 ^M00:40:00 That's how good we did. >> Micah May: There's got to be a question out there. Or a comment? Thank you. I guess if there's really not a question I've been wanting to ask one which is I mean you've heard us making the case and if anyone is feeling brave and wants to volunteer I would be curious of audience members what most excites you about the opportunity to own our ebook and our econtent delivery channels. What do you see as the most powerful and compelling opportunities? Anyone feeling brave and want to step up and volunteer? Why did you come to this talk? What gets you excited about this? ^M00:40:38 ^M00:40:42 Yeah. Thanks Michael. >> Michael: [inaudible] thank you very much. It's certainly very exciting. I think that libraries have learned in the last ten years that branding is essential and this is going to be an opportunity for us to do that. Second thing is it has been too difficult for library users to get access to content in many cases, ebook content, and if we can simplify that and provide a better model for the publishers to work with us that we will see continuing exponential increases in library ebooks. And libraries are not ebooks only its econtent, and this is yet another way to make ourselves more relevant and present in an increasingly digital world. >> Micah May: I think that's exactly right. We need to own this from every angle. If I'm not seeing other hands I guess I'd love to build on that publisher point. I think many of us have talked about the need to evolve relationships with publishers. And I think again projects like Amigos and Califa have been broken tremendous ground there in showing that smaller publishers are willing to work directly even with regional library associations, and make their books available through those platforms. I think one of the goals of the LEAP Project which is completely supportive of that and hopefully consistent with it is to allow libraries all over the country and library organizations like Califa and Amigos to onboard that content to a national marketplace. So that we can not only buy content on better terms but we can help to bring those relationships into existence so that we can offer a more diverse and a broader range of content And then the second piece of that is about getting to better terms. And I think we have begun to show that that's also possible. Examples like Open Ebooks whereby presenting the library values-based argument we were able to get these incredible donations that are now making this content free to low income. But also other work of the ALA Digital Content Working Group, and actually NYPL directly pushing with libraries I think multiple voices from the library community have helped both to bring libraries back, or publishers back into the library market in 2012, and can now go further in working directly with those publishers to get us the better deals. And I think that's one of the important points about why we need to take ownership of this whole pipeline, this whole channel because it's pretty clear to many of us I think that the commercial distributors from whom we buy books their incentives are just not well aligned. If we get a better price term, if we get a better term in terms of options they don't make any more money. And that just, in fact, costs them money because now they have to go redoing their systems to accommodate that term. So we need an advocate that is a sophisticated sort of a business advocate to deal with publishers especially the biggest publishers. And I think we can also benefit tremendously from a distributed capacity that allows libraries all over the country to be not only a provider of content but a channel for making content discoverable and available in libraries by working directly with publishers, and potentially in the future even authors in their region to bring that content into libraries and to make it discovered. Other questions or comments? >> Michelle Bickert: It's 3:47 now. >> Micah May: Okay. So we're technically two minutes past. >> Michelle Bickert: Thank you to my colleagues for joining me on this panel. Thank you to you all for joining us today. Hopefully you can find some cookies out there because we've got one more session. [inaudible] some coffee. But thank you all for coming. ^M00:44:21 [ Clapping ] ^M00:44:26 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.