Emma Breeze's Page

This is also a good book to read regarding eBooks and libraries - I read it last month: http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/book-review-by-michael-pastore-no-shelf-required-e-books-in-libraries-edited-by-sue-polanka/

For your library system, if you are "renting" eBooks to students, then our system won't work for you - instead, you will want to use DRM (digital rights management) in your eBooks - this means that you can't use PDF because the Kindle can only use non-DRM PDFs - you will need to obtain eBooks in MOBI/PRC, or AZW format. This is easy, especially since Amazon makes their massive eBook collection available in DRM AZW format and auto-downloads it to the Kindle. The DRM AZW format that Amazon uses ties the eBook to a single Amazon.com account (i.e. for your school) - if you purchase, say, 10 Kindles and attach each of them to the same Amazon.com account, they will all automatically download and display each eBook that you purchase using that Amazon.com account. The Kindles can then be signed out and students can read those eBooks. Since this set of eBooks can get quite large, you may want to create collections (subfolders by category) on your Kindles, and show students how to search for the right eBook by name from the Kindle Home screen.
Hope this helps!
Jason.

OK - here is the third post (I keep running out of available characters in these dialog boxes). Anyways, the way that we keep track of the eBooks that we use in our custom system (trioscollege.com) is by labelling the books using their ISBN 13 number followed by the character "e" - this allows us to easily determine whether the book is a printed book or eBook (because some of our programs are still using printed books). If it is an eBook, then the location of the eBook on our private file server is listed in the same record in our system so that our scheduling system can automatically retrieve it for the students who are enrolled in the class. The cost of the eBook is included in our tuition and our system automatically creates a purchase order for the publisher each time we run a class with eBooks. The publisher allows us to download a single copy of the eBook and distribute it to the students (we have a standard legal agreement to do this).
More to come - hope this helps!
Jason.

The main reason that our college pursued eBooks is because we have a mandate to "go green" - this includes online quizzing/exams via a custom LMS that we created in-house as well as a move to eBooks. Although eBooks have been available for most of our courses for some time now, we needed copies with no DRM (DRM is like "renting" a book rather than buying it, and our students want to own their textbook in 20 years), so we pressured publishers with our buying power (in other words, we pitted them against each other) and got our entire curriculum in non-DRM eBook form (which is a relatively small catalogue compared to a library catalogue).
We also customized our in-house system to automatically distribute eBooks to the right students and pay the publisher as well as update our own internal accounting system (it took about a week of programming to do this). When students log into trioscollege.com and log in with their student account, they see their email, forums, calendar, grades, and schedule - at the beginning of each course, they can go to their schedule and click on a link next to their course to download their eBook and manually copy it to the Kindle via the USB cable (we have the instructions on how to do this in our student guide, which I attached to a forum post last week). They must first accept a license agreement before downloading their eBook, and since the eBook is not DRM, they can view it on any computer/phone/device/eBook reader.
Hope this helps!

Sure - no problem! We spent 8 months researching everything to do with eBooks, including legality issues, eBook availability/publishing, formats, implementation, organizational requirements, etc. As a result, I may have already come across some information that will help you make decisions in your own school. I'll try to tell you a bit about how we implemented our system in the next post (because this dialog box is limited to 2000 characters), and as you see areas that you would like to know more about (or that are not mentioned and we may have researched), you can email me back or I could set up a conference call sometime if that works better for you.
Cheers,
Jason.