3M's new library eBook terminal and...tablets?

Sort of.  3M, formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, has brought its vast infrastructural attention to the little old world of eBooks. The company has designed a cloud based eBook platform that will work near-universally on any tablet device. Early reports of the platform point to a IT-friendly system that gives up ground on the gaming and application front in order to create a more secure and fluid eBook lending process.

That’s right. Multinational 3M is making a library-based eReader, replete with fixed terminal installed in the brick & mortar library itself and tablet-based handhelds for patron use.

The giant company is beta-testing the first wave of library e-readers in St. Paul, Minnesota public libraries. St. Paul’s library system has long been a part of the eBook game, though using the more traditional OverDrive service.

TwinCities.com writes about the back story of 3M’s development of the new system:

E-books have been available for checkout at the St. Paul Public Library for a couple of months, ever since the libraries started offering OverDrive, a content distribution system that competes with 3M’s cloud product. It manages digital book loans on consumer-owned devices like Kindle, Nook and others.

OverDrive will remain in the St. Paul libraries, said Savage, the spokeswoman for the libraries. The e-books available right now are “very popular,” she said. Most patrons load the e-books through their personal computers, and then transfer them to a tablet, she said.

3M technology has a 40-year history in libraries, tied to the checkout process and security. Earlier this year, 3M announced a “strategic relationship” with txtr, a German company that makes an e-reader similar to the Kindle.

While txtr is doing the software development for 3M’s cloud library system, 3M decided to contract with a different supplier for the actual 3M-branded reader, Mercer said.

3M is lining up 10 “beta” accounts – or ordinary-use testing sites – for its new cloud system. St. Paul’s public libraries are the only Minnesota site.

Currently 3M only has 60,000 titles but according to the above mentioned article they are supposedly working to grow that figure. One of the most interesting aspects to the 3M device, and why it is particularly wonderful for library-based research, is that it allows you to take notes within the book reading process and then retain those notes after the book is returned to the library. The system also has a security minded loaning program that will allow patrons to check out titles from their library while traveling anywhere the cloud can be accessed.

OverDrive has relatively dominated the eBook service market in libraries, but with a company like 3M entering the field, those days might be numbered.