Macmillan this week announced that they have struck a pilot deal to distribute Macmillan audiobooks to public libraries patrons via Midwest Tape’s hoopla digital platform. Macmillan is the first Big Five publisher to get on the hoopla platform, but officials at Midwest Tape say talks are underway with others, and more announcements are expected soon.
The Macmillan pilot will include bestselling and acclaimed authors as Jeffrey Archer, Orson Scott Card, Jackie Collins, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Atul Gawande, and Lisa Scottoline.
Debuting in the summer of 2013, hoopla is a digital service offering library patrons movies, streaming and digital downloads of TV shows, videos, music, audiobooks, and coming soon, e-books, to computers and mobile devices via the hoopla app. In its first two years, the hoopla interface has gotten high marks from librarians and library users, who have praised it as easy to use, and a more "Netflix," consumer-like experience.
Notably, hoopla’s forthcoming e-book service is based on a "transactional" model, with publishers getting paid for books read by libraries, as opposed to the dominant “one copy one user” analog era e-book lending model in libraries.
