Penguin Suspends E-Book Titles

Book with mouse

For those of you following the ever-present drama surrounding OverDrive, our provider of e-books and audiobooks, a new chapter in the controversy has begun.

Without warning to library staff or users, Penguin Group (publisher) has removed their books from the OverDrive purchasing catalog, as well as voiding all current Kindle versions of their e-books. The publisher cites security concerns.  So, if you received a notice that your requested e-book is available, but you can’t download it – this may be why.

At this point, we are unsure whether this action is permanent.  We do know that previously purchased Penguin titles will still be available in non-Kindle formats, though new titles will be completely unavailable to us through OverDrive.  For more information, please see this Forbes article.

Once again, I find myself apologizing on behalf of the library.  Ordinarily, we like to give our patrons lots of notice when a big policy change is coming.  We also like to be prepared to answer your questions and addresss your concerns.  Unfortunately, changes regarding OverDrive seem to happen overnight, and we only hear about it after the fact.  We’ve been through this before when HarperCollins decided to limit each e-book purchased to 26 uses.  Or,  how about when all of our e-books were suddenly available in Kindle format (good news!), but we had no prior instruction that would have allowed us to effectively manage the deluge of support requests.  Rest assured, we will continue to do our best to pass information along as soon as we get it.  Thank you, dear patrons, for your continued patience.

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