ALA 2016 Vendor Exhibits: Total Boox

I visited the Total Boox booth at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida and spoke with their CEO Yoav Lorch. Total Boox (launched in 2013) offers a “pay-as-you-read” pricing model: the library pays for a percentage of the book that the patron actually reads. If the patron revisits these same pages, the library is not charged again. This pricing model seems to make sense for books that are not typically read cover-to-cover: tech manuals, cookbooks, how-to. A press release from the 2016 ALA Midwinter Conference listed publishers that Total Boox had recently signed: Berlitz, De Gruyter, Lerner, Lonely Planet, Open Road Media, Oxford University Press, Sourcebooks, and Workman Publishing Group. A complete list of publishing partners can be found on the Total Boox site. Minitex hosted a webinar with Total Boox last Fall 2015; you can view the slide deck and recording.