Respected all, It is a news of concern that Penguin would no longer provide its ebooks via OverDrive (OD) that shares ebooks to lending libraries, which provide their content, of course, free of charge. OD extends its services to more than 7000 public libraries in US and approx. 950 publishers, and an access to over a hundred thousand works which OD helps libraries lending to patrons. Similar incidents happened earlier as Penguin once removed its titles from OD, but to return them again in few days without the new titles. Publishers, content providing mechanisms such as OD, and libraries all understandably have their own interests in mind, and some publishers, such as Simon & Schuster as well as Macmillan, don't lend books in this manner at all, while only Random House gives libraries full access to its entire catalog. The reason claimed in Penguin's retreat is in the process of lending books. While OD allows users to download books over the air directly to their devices, Penguin wanted the process to involve a download first to the patron's computer, then to the device, making the lending experience a bit more cumbersome. Regardless, this is likely not the last move in this discussion as publishers struggle to come to terms with the digital model. Earlier, at a meeting On February 8, American Library Association (ALA) president Molly Raphael met with executives at Random, Perseus, and Penguin and tried to resolve the issue. While nothing has been settled, it supposed to usher some optimism: there was a lot of air-clearing eliminating misconceptions while enhancing mutual appreciation, as claimed by her. But to the most of the publishers, a library is an institutional buyer especially in the print world, and not as channels for retail consumer sales to individual patron or user. Although some research clearly show that more than 19% of users who use the library weekly, not only read and borrow more books than other library users, but approx 40% of them confirm that they bought a book which was previously borrowed by them from the library; almost 70% bought a book by authors they discovered in the library. These Power Patrons are also more avid users of the library’s digital content and of social media.In fact, in contrast to what the publishers have feared for , ebook world may open up a new outlet for publisher sales, as evidenced by many libraries of late. The library website has usually a buy button on the homepage and that button enables patrons to purchase ebooks that are already checked out. In all this ferment, Random House, while reaffirming its commitment to library lending, announced that, with effect from March 1, plans to raise prices to wholesalers, who in turn set their own markups to libraries. Anyway, it indicates that the ebook ecosystem will continue to be wild and imprecise as publishers try to find the right pricing and access models for libraries and protect their businesses. Madhuryamay Das B.Tech (Univ. of Tech, WB), Masters (IIT-Kharagpur), MS-LIS (DRTC, ISI-Bangalore) (For regular blogging and most recent job-updates in LIS, please visit the blog at http://lis-digest.blogspot.in/) -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.