Ebook library for a geographically distributed team?

April 15, 2015 9:04 AM

My work team is interested in establishing a corporate library of books that we can all access. Since we are geographically dispersed, we thought ebooks would be a logical solution, but I can't figure out the best way to handle sharing books with the lending restrictions that ebooks have.

The team is currently small (about 5 people) and won't grow much in the short term. Most of us have iPads or Kindles with our personal libraries already. We're looking for a solution that is affordable for our current team, although being able to grow with this solution would be a nice bonus.

posted by philosophygeek to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Your company could set up an account with Overdrive.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:09 AM on April 15, 2015

Another way would be to have multiple kindles all linked to the same single account. This would mean the people who already have a personal kindle would have two: one linked only to their personal account and one linked only to the corporate account. The benefit here (besides keeping their personal reading private from everyone else) is that you could set all but one of those corporate kindles to prevent any purchases, so everyone can READ anything on the account but only the 'master' kindle can BUY content.
posted by easily confused at 9:30 AM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Set up a calibre server. unlocked ebooks (epub,mobi,azw) can be accessed and downloaded from a web front end.
example here
posted by exparrot at 10:11 AM on April 15, 2015 [3 favorites]