Fort Worth, TX - July 29, 2012 - “Since my eyesight has gotten so bad, I had quit coming to the library,” commented a senior adult to the library staffer at Wedgwood Baptist Church. She was one of the first to sign up for the library’s new eBook check out service. “Now you have eBooks.” she continued, “I can read those on my iPad^®. I just make the letters big enough to see. I love it! Thank you.”

This week, six Baptist church libraries in Texas began offering their members eBooks, the downloadable, electronic format used on popular readers such as Kindles^®, Nooks^® and iPads^®. They are the first church libraries in the nation to offer eBooks according to their service vendor, OverDrive.

"We realized our church members currently download their eBooks from public libraries and online stores. While nothing is wrong with that, we thought it was important to provide an alternate source that is family-safe and Christian-focused, much like we do for traditional print books," said Ruthe Turner, librarian at First Baptist Church, Dallas. 

To manage the eBook services, two consortia were formed to share the costs and the collection of eBook titles as well as audiobooks, music and video titles. One consortium, the Tarrant Baptist Libraries Digital Collection includes Birchman, Glenview, North   Richland Hills and Wedgwood Baptist churches. The other consortium, the Dallas/Rockwall Church Library Digital Collection, includes First Baptist Dallas and Park Cities Baptist churches.

“Anybody know a place to legally download Christian audiobooks for free?” read a vacationing college student’s Facebook post. A Wedgwood library staffer, in a return Facebook comment, was able to direct him to his church's new eBook service. It includes, in addition to eBooks, audiobooks, music and video in downloadable digital formats.  

The use of an outside service vendor was essential because the digital download process is highly technical. The two church consortia chose to work with OverDrive, the service used by most public and school libraries.

OverDrive is a leading full-service digital distributor of eBooks, audiobooks, music, and video. It delivers secure management, DRM protection, and download fulfillment services for hundreds of publishers and thousands of libraries, schools, and retailers serving millions of end users. OverDrive has been named to the EContent 100 as a company that matters most in the digital content industry. Founded in 1986, OverDrive is based in Cleveland, OH.