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What haven’t you noticed lately about NetLibrary?

OCLC’s NetLibrary service integrates with other OCLC online services, streamlines remote access, reengineers its site and adds new content—including audiobooks

Five years ago, a group of Colorado-based entrepreneurs ushered in the eBook era by rolling out the first catalog of electronic books to the library world. Today, NetLibrary, an OCLC service, remains on top of the eBook world with more than 12,000 libraries in 41 countries making eBooks available to their users. About 8 million pages are viewed every month. Among the major enhancements NetLibrary has made to its service the past year:

Integration with OCLC services. MARC records for NetLibrary eBooks are in WorldCat and can be downloaded to local catalogs, and eBooks can be linked to from OCLC FirstSearch.
Remote access using automatic IP address recognition anytime, anywhere. Searchers no longer have to enter an authorization and password when they log in from the library Web site.
A streamlined interface with more intuitive navigation, enhanced search capabilities and faster page loads.
A growing variety of authoritative content including audiobooks, popular materials, subject collections and foreign language titles.

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Online paid content totals $853 million in first half of 2004

The overall rate of growth for online paid content remains robust, according to a report from the Online Publishers Association and comScore Networks. In the first half of 2004, online content spending grew to $853 million, up 14 percent over the same period in 2003. Other findings:

Entertainment/Lifestyles was the fastest growing paid content category, up 78.3 percent over the same period last year, while Sports/Games also showed strong gains of 68.7 percent and 27.4 percent, respectively.
Entertainment/Lifestyles was the only category to experience more than 100-percent, year-over-year growth fueled primarily by online music sales.
The Personals/Dating category remains the largest paid content category, with Business/Investment now at number three behind Entertainment/Lifestyles.
The subscription share of paid content sales hit its highest point—90 percent—driven by significant subscription growth in games, news and research.
The number of U.S. consumers paying for online content continues to grow; 16.8 million U.S. consumers paid for online content, up from 16.0 million a year ago.

View the report

Top 1,000 library books identified by OCLC Research

The new OCLC Top 1000 Web site lists the works most widely held by libraries, with sublists, a readers’ poll, sample cover art, “Find in a Library” links, comparisons to other lists and a download file.

Visitors can view all 1,000 ranked titles or any of a baker’s dozen different sublists, including banned books, biography, books made into films, children's books, drama, fiction, librarianship, music, poetry and others.

View OCLC Research Top 1,000 List

OCLC welcomes the following new member libraries

El Colegio Universitario de San Juan
Location: San Juan, Puerto Rico
OCLC Symbol: CUTSJ
OCLC Network: SOLINET

Creekside Elementary School
Location: Elgin, Illinois, USA
OCLC Symbol: ILCRE
OCLC Network: ILLINET

Garfield Elementary School
Location: Elgin, Illinois, USA
OCLC Symbol: ILGES
OCLC Network: ILLINET

Membership guidelines and protocols

WorldCat update

Every 10 seconds an OCLC member library adds a new record to WorldCat, which contained more than 57 million records representing 951,755,121 holding locations as of November 27, 2004. Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat, which has supported 140,741,598 interlibrary loan requests as of November 27, 2004. A library user searches WorldCat using the OCLC FirstSearch service every second.

See the latest WorldCat record

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OCLC Abstracts uses the Internet to deliver timely information about OCLC services, programs, news and events directly to subscribers’ desktops. This e-journal augments and complements OCLC’s Web site and print communications.