THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN QUEBEC PUBLIC LIBRARIES AND BIBLIOPRESTO.CA: REINVENTING PUBLIC LIBRARIES THROUGH DIGITAL

To respond to new reading practices, public libraries are expected to offer digital, or electronic books. To do this, two conditions must be met: organize access to a digital publishing offer and make it available. These two conditions were met by the partnership of the participating libraries with De Marque and the negotiations with the key players of the book chain. We wanted to study the new relational dynamics between the partners of the ebook chain involved in the fulfilment of these two conditions to better understand how they contributed to the development of the licensing model for the lending of ebooks in public libraries, a major element in the development of and access to digital resources in public libraries. To this end, we collected, between August and November 2021, in an inductive and qualitative approach (Luckerhoff and Guillemette, 2012), different types of data, including discourse data on the partnership experiences of 10 of the key players of this project. The analyses are presented for each of the two conditions for the realization of the ebook offer in public libraries.