How the well-connected Panorama Project could help give us a national library endowment
David H. Rothman advocates on behalf of the Panorama Project which he says is not just an effort of librarians even though it’s benefiting from the input of Alan S. Inouye, the ALA’s director of public policy. Among the others involved have been people from the Book Industry Study Group, independent booksellers, Penguin Random House, and OverDrive, the largest supplier of books for libraries and schools. One of the recurring themes in the project’s research is that synergies can exist not only between books and other media, but also between the library and retails models. For example, among several thousand readers surveyed, “38.31% of respondents had bought a book online that they first found in a library (within the last 12 months.” Local bookstores also benefited, and the project intends to explore this further. The findings are just preliminary, but based on earlier work by researchers for OCLC and OverDrive, Rothman doubts there will be surprises in regard to synergies between libraries and retail.