I never heard of this service until it showed up in an email I got from the New York Public Library:
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Well, this excited me! A way to support the NYPL and buy eBooks. What’s not Win about that?
You’ll quickly see.
I go to LibraryBIN and get this pop-up in the middle:
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OK, that sounds good.
As it turns out, this is from OverDrive. So it’s using “classic” Adobe DRM and has the files OverDrive distributes to public libraries:
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So, of course, I head straight for Stieg Larsson and get punched in the face:
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Oh my god! EPIC FAIL! Those prices are at least double what they cost at regular eBookstores! People don’t even like paying that price differential as overdue fines and they expect them to do it with eBooks?
Let’s do some math:
Amazon Kindle:
Dragon: $5.20
Fire: $7.57
Nest: $9.99
TOTAL: $22.76
LibraryBIN:
Dragon: $11.96
Fire: $12.76
Nest: $22.36
TOTAL: $47.08
$22.76 for all three versus $47.08 for all three. In fact, just buying Tattoo and Fire add up to $24.72 — more than all three books elsewhere!
As much as I love the New York Public Library, highway robbery is not a way to get support from me.
This is going nowhere.
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I showed you this months ago. My alternate suggestion was that they let me buy the ebook for the library instead (the library would own it).
I honestly don’t remember it at all, if you did show it to me.
Dude. I’ve been railing against this for at least a year! I talked about it in the NYT. THIS is what LIBRARIES have to pay to stock ebooks. Talk about getting punched in the face! You’re only going to buy one copy. We’re going to buy (likely) more than one and we STILL don’t get a discount. #fail Indeed.
You are correct, ebooks are overpriced, but as far as audiobooks it is cheeper than audiobooks.com