Atingo Connects Swedish Self-Publishers with Libraries

by: Suw Charman-Anderson

Atingo, a new Swedish ebook lending platform, is not only remaking the relationship between publishers and libraries, it’s also providing a simple way for self-publishers to offer their ebooks to libraries for lending alongside traditional titles.

The joint venture between Axiell, one of the library sector’s largest technology companies, and publishing platform Publit was recently launched at the Media Evolution conference in Malmö. Atingo allows publishers to set loan prices and manage availability on a book by book basis, and allows libraries to choose which books they wish to lend and how much they want to spend on them.
Publit’s CCO, Jonas Lennermo, explained that publishers can now control lending through controlling prices, rather than through windowing which can be frustrating for readers who want to borrow the latest bestsellers.

“They set the price and can change that price at any time,” he said “In the past, if they didn’t want to release a new novel to libraries immediately, they could wait until it had been in the book shop for four months or so, but now with Atingo publishers can just raise the price.”

Those higher prices act as a disincentive for libraries to lend new titles straight away, but if a library wants to blow its budget on brand new bestsellers, it can — the publishers simply get more loan revenue. Importantly, Atingo gives the libraries have more control too: they can choose books by price, title, publisher, author, genre, etc., so they can curate their ebook catalogue to reflect the needs of their own local community.

Atingo isn’t just for traditional publishers: Because Publit is also a self-publishing platform, for both ebooks and print-on-demand books, it’s easy for self-published authors to also make their books available to libraries.

“The main thing for self-publishers is that the library becomes another retail channel,” says Lennermo. “They set the price and reach the library on their own terms. It is particularly good for authors that are locally important. With Atingo, self-publishers can initiate collaborations with their local library.”

What makes it a lot easier for Swedish libraries and publishers to negotiate in this way is that their lending model is very simple: Publishers set a price per loan and libraries decide whether they are going to pay it or not. In the UK and US it’s a bit more complicated, explains Smashwords’ Mark Coker, who says that there are two common systems:

1.  Working with an library ebook aggregator such as Baker & Taylor Axis 360, Overdrive or 3M’s Cloud Library. These services aggregate ebooks from publishers and distributors (such as Smashwords), and also manage the library’s checkout systems via a hosted service arrangement. Libraries pay for the book once and then can check it out to one patron at a time.  When a book is checked out, others can’t check out that book until either the previous reader checks it back in, or the library purchases a second (or third, etc) copy. Smashwords has signed agreements with all three of these aggregators, though at this time only Baker & Taylor has completed its integration with Smashwords. The other two are forthcoming as soon as integrations are complete.

2.  A library creates their own ebook checkout system, commonly referred to as “The Douglas County Model,” pioneered by Jamie Larue of the Douglas County Library in Colorado.  Under this model, the library or library consortium purchases books directly from publishers or distributors, and then manages their own ebook checkout systems typically powered by Adobe Content Server.

David Burleigh, Overdrive’s director of marketing, expands on some of the complexity in library ebook lending in the US/UK:

The most common model is one copy per user, in which libraries (and schools) purchase the license for an ebook and circulate it one copy at a time during each borrower’s lending period. Within that, a few publishers also have set terms so that the ebook licensed must be repurchased after 26, or another set number, of checkouts (or in some cases it’s one or two years).
The second most common model is simultaneous access, in which libraries (and schools) purchase the licenses for a package of titles from a publisher (25 or more) and can circulate them to any number of users simultaneously for a 12 month period.  We offer titles in this model from about 30-40 publishers.

So if a self-published author wants to get their ebooks into British or American libraries, then the only real way to go is through third party distributors.

“We currently offer thousands of self-published works from aggregators such as Smashwords and Author Solutions, so we recommend to authors to connect with them to get into the OverDrive catalog,” said Burleigh.

To support libraries operating their own checkout system, Smashwords launched Library Direct, giving self-publishers more control over pricing via the Pricing Manager. This means that authors will be able to give books to libraries at whatever price they like, including free, setting loan costs independently of retail prices. For libraries using Overdrive, the self-publisher has some control over pricing through Smashwords. But not all library aggregators — including Overdrive and Baker & Taylor — support free offerings because Adobe charges the libraries a fee every time a patron checks out a book, even a free book.

“[Pricing is] between the author and the aggregator,” says Burleigh. “We typically don’t seek free eBooks for our catalog; we offer Gutenberg public domain titles for free to libraries and schools.”
With Atingo, the publisher can set the loan price at zero but “the library will […] be charged 1.50 SEK per loan”, which is about 15p or 24¢. Atingo also takes 10 percent of the publishers revenue to cover costs.

At the moment, Atingo is only available in Sweden, but there are plans to eventually roll it out to other countries, including the UK. Axiell is a huge player in the library sector so there’s every reason to think that they will want to launch in their other territories as well. And because Atingo is a neutral platform, any local supplier can engage with it, making expansion easier. Says Publit’s Lennermo:

For a library that use Axiell’s services, everything is already in place. For a library that use another service provider, they get an API key to integrate in their library system. On a technical level, everything is built in modules so it is easy to add new ‘building blocks’ with new functions as we go along, for example, adding multiple simultaneous business models.
On a general level, we see ourselves as distributors (digital navvies :) – we want make the relationship between the library and the publisher as good as possible, by giving them the right tools to collaborate. We don’t judge on how e-lending should be done, we simply make it possible, and leave the decision to the publisher and the library.

Libraries have a lot to offer both publishers and self-publishers, says Lennermo. They know their local communities very well and, with bookshops disappearing, they are going to become increasingly important as venues for people to find out about books. They could become crucial allies, providing business intelligence, aggregating anonymised reader data and feeding that back to publishers to help support their marketing efforts.

from: Forbes