1.500 E-books for Free

As of 1 November 2011 visitors of Danish libraries can rent e-books from the Internet and download them to computer, Tablet PC, or Smartphone. Gyldendal Publishing House and 54 other publishers made an agreement with public libraries.

 

Now Danes have access to a huge free home library. Ereolen.dk is a project of e-books for public libraries which was launched with 1500 titles on the digital bookshelves ready for downloading to PC, Tablet PC, or Smartphone.

“The mission of the project is to provide the readers with the latest books in electronic form. At the moment there are almost 1500 books, a lot of which are totally new. The readers can find a great number of new and up-to-date books here because the publishers’ approach is to publish e-books and their paper version simultaneously”, Susanne Iversen, the Project Manager says.

To rent e-books free of charge, the reader just needs to have a reader’s number or CPR-number, and a password which they will use to enter ereolen.dk and take a limited number of books per time for a period of one month. Around 80 out of 97 libraries in Denmark are registered on ereolen.dk.

Usually a reader can rent five books a month but it depends on the library. When the deadline to return the books comes they can have them prolonged for one more time, but the reader will not have access to the e-books for the next three months then. This restriction is imposed by Gyldendal Publishing House.

“It is going to be interesting to see if the library users will wish to buy some of the e-books they rent. Next to each book there are “Rent” and “Buy” buttons. The latest one can be used when the reader runs into restrictions. We wonder if this conversion will make users buy e-books. It is a rule that libraries pay for each download readers make”, Elisabeth Fogtdal, CEO of Gyldendal says in an interview with Berlingske.

The project might become not only a good store for writers and publishers but also encourage spread of information on the market.

This pilot project was launched on 1 November 2011 and will last until autumn 2012 when the libraries and publishers have to reach a new agreement based on the experience of the first year.

The following books are already available on the site: Steve Jobs’ biography, Peter Oevig Knudsen’s new book “Hippie”, and Helle Helle’s novel “Dette burde skrives i nutid”.
 
The project is initiated by the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media (Styrelsen for Bibliotek og Medier).

 

 

Original text, photo: Berlingske