by Rita Baladad
Quick Summary
Two vendors who have entered the North American e-content distribution marketplace somewhat recently are Odilo and Hoopla; I visited both of these vendors at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference.
Two vendors who have entered the North American e-content distribution marketplace somewhat recently are Odilo and Hoopla; I visited both of these vendors at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference.
Odilo (launched in 2015) is a company based in Spain. According to the content editor I spoke with, Odilo has a large marketshare in Western Europe and expansion in the Americans was the next logical step. Odilo’s strength is established relationships with foreign-langauge publishers (primarily Spanish and Western European languages). Additionally, Odilo is able to offer content from the Big Five trade publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster). Odilo is able to work with consortial collections (delineating consortial content from locally-owned content); Odilo’s founder informed me that they are currently working on implementation of a consortial collection in Mexico. Also, the Odilo platform can integrate content by other vendors (3M, OverDrive) and offers the most common pricing models: subscription; simultaneous users; pay-per-use; one-copy-per-user (with expiration or perpetual).
Hoopla (launched in 2013) is an affiliate of Midwest Tape and based in Ohio (similar to 3M and their library systems division, before 3M sold off the division to Biblioteca). I found Hoopla interesting because in addition to ebooks and audiobooks, they also offer movies and television programming. The Hoopla rep assured me, however, that Hoopla was not trying to compete with Netflix but rather serve as a fill-in for library customers without access to online video streaming. Hoopla also offers graphic novels and comics; the Hoopla app is unique in that it shows the graphics panel by panel (instead of each page as one large image). Hoopla’s pricing model can be budget friendly as it offers pay-per-use. One big drawback to Hoopla is that they are not currently offering content from the Big Five.
