Late Wednesday morning, Penguin issued a statement in which it said that it is, at least temporaily, making its "older titles" available once again through OverDrive for distribution to libraries, though new titles will not be available. The action came after talks between Amazon and Penguin in which Amazon said it had not been consulted by OverDrive about the terms of Penguin's agreement with OverDrive. As a result of those discussions "Amazon has undertaken to work with Penguin and OverDrive between now and the end of the year to address Penguin’s concerns. Penguin will, as a result, restore the supply of these titles until the end of the year in order to return the availability of older titles to all its digital customers," the statement read.
The statement also attempted to shed some light on what led up to Penguin's actions.
"Penguin USA took the decision yesterday to withhold the supply of new digital titles from suppliers to US libraries until concerns about the security of the copyright of its authors have been resolved," the statement said. "In addition, Penguin informed suppliers to libraries that it expected them to abide by existing agreements to offer older digital titles to libraries only if those files were held behind the firewalls of the suppliers. Following receipt of this information, Overdrive, a supplier of ebooks to US libraries, removed “Get for Kindle” from its offering."
