Schools often hear talk of ebooks and think they’ll be able to get simultaneous use copies of great classroom reads for cheap. That’s not always the case. First, the basics:
1. You own the ebooks you buy. Your platform doesn’t own them. Your vendor doesn’t own them. You do. (Which is why you can transfer them to the shared collection in Sora.)
2. Owning ebooks applies only if you buy a license for an ebook, not a subscription to an ebook service (for example, MyOn or Epic).
3. Publishers set the price for ebooks. Not the platform. Not the vendor. The publishers. And the publishers are trying to figure out how to make money on the ebooks they sell. Ebooks don’t get lost, wear out, or chewed up by dogs, so libraries don’t have to buy replacement copies.
4. There are several purchase options listed here from most preferable to least preferable (in my opinion!):
- Multi Use Purchase Option, aka simultaneous use. This allows many readers to access the book at the same time.
- One copy/one user, no limits. Note this means that only one person can read the title at a time, but your license never expires.
- One copy/one user, fixed # of uses. Usually after 26 or 52 uses, your license to the ebook will expire. Again, only one person can read the ebook at a time, but it might take a while for a book to be read 26 or 52 times.
- One copy/one user, term limited. Usually two years, but one year licenses are showing up more often now. For a single school, for classrooms, this is a terrible deal. It’s very unlikely you could justify the expense.
This explanation of pricing models should highlight for you the beauty of IndySchoolShare – several schools can collaborate on a purchase of a classroom set, reserve copies ahead of time, and share the cost. Schools in a district can share titles in their district pool and then float them up to the pool where all schools can access them. For a one year term limited title, careful coordination would be needed. You would need to look at the cost of paperback copies and do your own cost benefit analysis!