A few months ago, Marie D’Onofrio, one of the school librarians I work with, told me she was going to buy some fiction ebooks. D’Onofrio, who works at Livonia (NY) High School, purchased four ebooks from Lerner’s Carolrhoda imprint. She wasn’t familiar with the titles, but took a chance anyway.

The students loved the books. That wasn’t surprising, since Carolrhoda has been producing award-winning books for more than 30 years. Still, for D’Onofrio, as for so many other school librarians, exploring fiction ebooks was a voyage into the unknown.

Why? Because the status of digital fiction in school libraries is still relatively undefined, compared with nonfiction, whose traction in schools is pretty established by now. Public libraries’ evolution toward incorporating fiction ebooks has received a lot of attention, but schools are still catching up.

Right now, K–12 offerings in fiction ebooks are largely restricted to titles from the big trade publishers offered on services such as OverDrive or packages of pre-selected titles like TumbleBooks. Our knowledge of authors and ebook titles from other fiction publishers is still foggy.

This summer, the haze will lift with the introduction of a new program called “Here Be Fiction” (HereBeFiction.org). The endeavor is a collaboration between my system, the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership, Mackin, and School Library Journal.

This is how it works. School librarians who use Here Be Fiction will be able to identify quality ebooks available from a wide variety of publishers such as Lerner, Charlesbridge, August House, and more. Users can browse ebook previews and reviews posted at HereBeFiction.org, enabling them to discover fiction from established sources. The site also offers school library-friendly licensing terms, with titles readily available for licensing by school libraries for both individual and multi-user access.

During the project’s first active phase, from July 15 to September 15, selected school librarians around the country will have free access during their summer vacations to read and review ebook fiction from participating publishers, using the secure Mackin VIA platform. Looking ahead, Here Be Fiction will again allow teachers to sample books for free during future school vacation times—and active reading phases—in the winter and spring.

Throughout the year, the website will be available to everyone, with open access to lists of titles, short previews, and reviews, all of which will help librarians and teachers find and select new content. Here Be Fiction will also feature author biographies, publisher overviews, and editorial content focusing on ways to use ebooks in classrooms and school libraries.

Active site visitors will find it easy to highlight and share books they discover via Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. They will also be able to create wish lists of featured books that can then be downloaded or sent directly to Mackin for a price quote.

The need for a program like Here Be Fiction has become more urgent this past year, as school librarians have faced increasing pressure to deliver ebook fiction for both student-selected reading and teacher-directed class use.

To meet school librarians’ unique needs, participating publishers must agree to three requirements:

1) They must provide either multi-user or individual access plans, with a discount for licensing multiple simultaneous readers. This way, ebooks can be used for class novels, book clubs, reading groups, and other group purposes.

2) Publishers must make ebooks available for offline access through a secure platform like Mackin VIA or a download with appropriate security. This enables the participation of students and schools with limited WiFi access.

3) They must, when possible, enable the use of text-to-speech functionality through the reading platform to support struggling readers or those with special needs.

The site launches this summer in limited beta format. Access will be made available to additional school librarian reviewers as quickly as possible.

Hachette’s entire catalog of 5,000 ebooks will now be available through OverDrive, Baker & Taylor’s Axis 360 platform, and the 3M Cloud Library, under a pricing and licensing model similar to the one employed by Random House. New titles will be made available to libraries immediately upon publication, and Hachette will charge libraries three times the retail hardcover price for new releases. One year after publication, the purchase price will drop to one and a half times the cost of retail, according Hachette’s announcement. These ebooks are then “owned” by the purchasing library. Licenses do not expire, and titles can be checked out an unlimited number of times under a one book/one user model.

“Our goal is to have authors’ work available on as many bookshelves and platforms as possible, and we’re looking forward to working with public libraries to serve their communities of readers as their reading habits evolve,” Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch said in the announcement.

The news first broke in a New York Times op-ed by NYPL President Tony Marx, who commented on improving relations between the Big Six publishers and libraries over the sale of ebooks.

“While HarperCollins…was the first to provide access, after the [economic] downturn, it limited the number of times each e-book could be lent, while Hachette decided to no longer sell new e-books to libraries, and Penguin, which had agreed to do so, said it might back out,” he wrote. “To their credit, the publishers have now each come around,” with Simon & Schuster and Macmillan also recently announcing pilot programs.

Yet while the situation is improving, “many issues still need to be sorted out,” Marx adds. Between the expiring licensing terms or loan caps or imposed by  HarperCollins, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, or the significantly higher-than-retail prices charged by Random House and Hachette, ebooks remain very expensive for libraries, during a period of rising demand and declining budgets.

Hachette’s announcement states that its library ebook pricing model will be reviewed annually, with input from stakeholders including the American Library Association (ALA). ALA President Maureen Sullivan today expressed hope that an ongoing dialog may lead to more favorable pricing for libraries in the future.

“We welcome Hachette Book Group’s assertion that they will continue to review their library pricing going forward,” Sullivan said in a statement to the press. “ALA and its members believe that there must be business models with lower price points for which publishers can still make a reasonable profit.”

“With open minds and open communications channels, I believe libraries, publishers and authors will continue to find solutions to bring more content and greater balance to the reading ecosystem.”

Photo: Stockbyte

Fans of baseball, football, and basketball, you all have something in common: it’s easy for you to tell what team is on the field, which one is off of it, and when players are changing their roles from offense to defense. In baseball, of course, three outs and the team at-bat retreats into the dugout, picks up its mitts, and trots back onto the field. In football, there are many variations and tricks of the trade. For example, a “hurry-up” offense is designed to move so quickly that the defense doesn’t have time to substitute fresh players onto the field. But in general, the exchange of players in our nation’s major sports is a slow and stately process that’s based on principles that kids learn when they first begin playing a particular game. There’s one sport, though, that’s totally different from the others—and I suspect it has a lesson to teach those of us in library land.

Unlike other sports, in hockey, players “change on the fly.” That is, a coach signals a group of players to jump onto the ice even as the others are whizzing off—the exchange happens in the middle of a play, as the puck is speeding down the ice. Hockey is such an exhausting sport that players only last a few minutes playing at full tilt, so a coach is constantly deliberating over whom to put in while trying to outguess the other coach’s moves. It’s a speeded-up, live chess match on ice.

I’m put in mind of hockey because of some recent developments in digital publishing. We’ve long known that Overdrive offers libraries subscriptions, rather than full ownership of books. Now Amazon has gotten into the act, offering its Prime members (who pay an annual fee) an ebook subscription. It strikes me that collection development is similar to the easy ebb and flow of offense and defense that I first described. A librarian knows her collection, sees where she needs to add titles, and from time to time, weeds those titles that have outlived their usefulness. But subscriptions are more like hockey.

In the digital subscription world, a librarian isn’t expecting her collection to remain the same for any length of time. She subscribes according to her current needs, knowing that the materials she has made available to today’s patrons may significantly change in the near future. For instance, she wants the latest and greatest of, say, news and financial databases. But in a subscription model, the constant churning and turnover isn’t just a matter of adhering to the latest dateline. A librarian may gain, or lose, an entire chunk of her collection as her subscription funding comes and goes, or as publishers’ digital policies change, or as patrons’ favorite digital devices shift.

What if we embrace a library model that’s part baseball and part hockey? What would such an arrangement look like? Print books, and some databases, would move in and out of the library at a leisurely pace, similar to ballplayers taking and leaving the field between innings. But digital subscriptions would constantly change on the fly: with new materials in, the old out, and the librarian playing the role of a highly tactical hockey coach, constantly matching ever-changing needs to ever-evolving resources. If that’s the case, the question isn’t “What do you own?” it’s “What do you need this very second?”

I can imagine a two-sport library, but there’s one caution. As you hockey fans well know, there’s one thing that can stop the rapid change of lines: when the game itself stops. The NHL and its players spent much of 2012 embroiled in a battle over money, and as a result, the players lost more than half of the current season. The one real danger in a subscription model is that it could break down totally and publishers could turn to some completely different plan. Well, if that happens, then librarian-coaches will just have to change partners and dance—on the fly.