e-book readers hit the jackpot

On Monday we turned on a relatively new LMS product called e-Resource Central or eRC & have been amazed at the impact it has had in connecting customers to e-books.

What is eRC?  It is a piece of software from SirsiDyinx our LMS provider.  It displays records for all of the e-books we have bought through our current e-book supplier Overdrive directly in our discovery product Enterprise.  So - instead of people needing to know that they have to go directly to the Overdrive site to find our e-books, they can just be searching their library's "catalogue" and all of the e-books are there, displayed & ready to download!

We've been waiting a while to get this service operational, so we're delighted that it is having a real impact already. On Monday (1 June) we populated Enterprise with our e-book holdings and this was the result:
Monday: 796 new signed up e-book downloading customers
Tuesday 2,497
Wednesday 1,625
Thursday 1,404
Friday 1,020 (& the day isn't done).

So by making these resources discoverable without any publicity over 7,300 people have downloaded their 1st free e-book from their public library catalogue.  Imagine what will happen when we start telling people about it!

Also - we've almost concluded contract negotiations to add the content from a second e-book provider to the system, which will be great.  Once we have the 2 providers working properly we'll be spruiking this to all & sundry.

As can be seen in the screenshot below, many e-books provide an opportunity to preview a book before downloading it.

We're delighted to have e-books integrated into all SA public libraries' catalogues & can't wait to add new titles in coming months.