First-ever International Read an E-book Day is Thursday

There are all kinds of crazy non-holidays and semi-holidays: Feb. 22 is Walking the Dog Day, Nov. 14 is National Pickle Day, April 11 is Barbershop Quartet Day. Now we can add to them the newly minted International Read an E-Book Day.

The new holday -- “holiday”? -- is the brainchild of OverDrive, a major e-book distributor. OverDrive is the country’s largest provider of e-books to libraries; it handles e-books from 5,000 publishers, including major Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Perseus, Wiley, and Harlequin.

If you’ve ever checked an e-book out from the L.A. Public Library, it was provided by OverDrive.

To celebrate International Read an E-book Day, Overdrive will be giving away tablets and e-reading devices at the readanebookday.com website and through social media. Readers are asked to “tell their story of what eBooks mean to them” and use the hashtag #eBookDay to be eligible.

Borrowing e-books from libraries hasn’t always been easy. Publishers have been cautious about offering digital books to borrowers and challenged by the fact that the form disrupts the classic business arrangements they have with libraries. In recent years, however, library borrowing has gotten easier.

OverDrive is supporting the idea of readers purchasing e-books as well as library borrowing.

Because reading is generally a quiet, solitary experience, it’s possible that the occasion of Read an E-book Day may pass by without much noise. If you miss it, there’s always the next day’s “holiday” -- Friday brings us Talk Like a Pirate Day, matey.

Book news and more; I’m @paperhaus on Twitter