eReolen – ‘downloan’ e-books

November saw the launch of eReolen.dk and as soon as December, a total of 98 municipalities had joined. This is among other things due to the 1 million kroner in subsidies given by the Danish Agency for Culture.

Number of visits and number of ‘downloans’

In the first month, the new free service had a total of 86,000 visits from 48,000 unique visitors. The number of visitors for December is similar to the numbers from November but there is an obvious climb in the number of downloans. In November there were 19,000 downloans. This number rose to more than 24,000 in December and that equals an accumulated downloan of 43,504 for eReolen’s first two months.

Users

In November eReolen had approximately 10,000 active users. In December the number was close to 12,000, which is an increase of 20 percent. In December users had around 2000 titles to choose from and just over half of users preferred visiting eReolen via a mobile device.

Background

The project was subsidised by the Danish Agency for Culture. It started in the spring of 2011 and runs to the end of 2012. Aarhus Public Libraries are involved with business agreements, technical service, editorial issues, and support in relation to eReolen.dk.

Project partners are the six central libraries and the libraries of the consortium behind Netlydbog.dk (online audio books): Frederiksberg, Gentofte, Copenhagen and Aarhus as well as the licensing group, the publishing companies Gyldendal and Lindhardt & Ringhof, Litteratursiden (Literature website) and the IT providers DBC and Publizon.