Proquest has just announced a new program called Access-to-own. The essence of this service is to utilize Demand-Driven Acquisition that will allow libraries to display thousands of e-book titles and only pay when users borrow the e-book.
The pilot for Access-to-Own will launch in mid-2016, with 14 publishers already signed on and many more expected to participate: Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, SAGE, Taylor & Francis Group (which includes Routledge, CRC Press, and Ashgate), Wiley, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, De Gruyter, Guilford Press, John Benjamins, World Bank Publications, University of Pennsylvania Press, Indiana University Press, University of North Carolina Press, University Press of Colorado, and Fordham University Press.
You can tell that Proquest, arguably one of the largest companies involved in the library space borrowed a page out of Hoopla’s playbook to launch Access-to-own. Hoopla has been utterly disrupting the library space for a number of years and was the pioneer behind the Demand-Driven Acquisition concept.
Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.