Are there any solutions available for managing a corporate library of ebooks?

Question

My employer maintains a small library of technical books for developers. If there's a book we think would be useful for us, we typically buy a number of copies and place them in the library, where the employees can borrow them.

This works well for paperbooks, but with more and more people wanting to use ereaders or tablets to read, we are looking for a solution that solves the same problem, but for ebooks.

Ideally, it would be a solution that works with books from any publisher, and with any ereader/reader-app.

I've seen that Overdrive offers a corporate library service, but from the description I was able to find on their site, it seems rather limited and a bad fit for our needs.

In case it's relevant to the answers, we are located in Norway, but will typically purchase books in english from the US or UK.

PS. If we were to ignore legal issues, we could simply set up calibre on a machine with the web-interface running, and add books when purchased. However, I believe this would at the very least land us in some very grey areas legally speaking.

Answer 1

There aren’t many choices. The most simple is to have a cloud-like space/service or simply a shared intranet directory. The need for controlling readers requires much more and is typically dependent on a special app or DRM. This issue is typically a thing for bigger companies like publishers or libraries (Adobe Content Server, Azardi Online).

If it is simple, small library it would need simple and strict rules. Otherwise the solution would be expensive, complex and annoying for you.

You could also try: Personal Book Space but I have no experiences with it.

Answer 2

BookFusion allows businesses to create their own public or private digital library to legally distribute, ebooks, manuals, white papers and other digital content securely to your customers or employees. These books can include interactivity like videos, animations, interactive troubleshooting questions and a variety of other interactivity.

Organizations are able to upload content using a user friendly web interface and members can read on IOS, Android and Web

You can learn more by visiting https://www.bookfusion.com/business

We also have partnerships with local and international publishers.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of BookFusion. We currently use the corporate library functionality of our platform to share eBooks, meeting minutes and strategy documents.

Answer 3

After visiting a recent CILIP showcase in London I was seeking a similar solution for a client and fell upon Soutron and there corporate eBook PDF delivery software. In talks with them now.

Looks promising as you can control who receives which title and set DRM permissions, rules for printing or not etc. Works for eReaders, Tablets and desktops.

Hope this helps

Answer 4

I review books for my blog and I offer my readers my library to get the copy of the book themselves if they so choose. I did this by going to Goodreadsand syncing my purchased amazon books then using the free widget to put my goodreads library onto my website. It is one easy option until you find a better.