The American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference is almost wrapped up, and Good e-Reader was live on the scene. We talked to many of the leading digital publishing companies focused on the modern library, such as 3M, Overdrive, Zinio, Recorded Books, and a few others. This year, many of the leading publishers, such as Scholastic, Harper Collins, Penguin, and Macmillian, were not talking digital at all! Instead they were abiding by the same philosophy on hustling tangible books. With all of the emphasis on digital content in libraries, it is odd that ebooks were severely underrepresented.
All of the major publishers we spoke to at this event were basically local sales people who had no idea on what their companies were doing in the digital space. Many claimed to just be part sales reps whose minds were boggled when we asked them simple questions.
The ALA Mid-Winter Conference was the place to be this weekend with the event trending on Twitter at all hours on Friday and Saturday. Librarians from all over North America were in attendance, talking about the shift to digital and participating in many sessions talking about big data and how libraries can get into ebooks.
If you did not attend this event, you can live vicariously through our own experiences there with the slideshow below!
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Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
