eBooks. The wave of the future. The end to publishing as we know it.

Blah, blah, blah.

I didn’t believe it when it first started in the late 90′s with the first eBooks. I was working at a Library that bought 6 of them and loaded them with genre related materials (one was SciFi, the other Mystery, etc.) and made them available to check out. We had a long procedure for checking them in and out (making sure there was this cord and that cord and the stylus…). And as I recall from distant days I think I only saw them checked out a handful of times. After a year or so, they were not requested and that was the end of that.

Fast forward 10 years to today. Technology has improved, people are more tech savvy (maybe? we hope?) and eBooks have taken off. [They have even been made fun of as seen in this comic] I’ve seen people on the train reading from their kindle or iPad. I’ve been a little envious, but I am not an early adopter kind of person. So when my Grandpa hinted that I might be getting an eBook reader for graduation (“Every new Librarian ought to know how to use one” he said) I hopped on the web to see which ones my local public library offered.

Turns out, they don’t.

In fact none of the Libraries in the consortium (3 counties with a total of 22 Libraries) do. So I sent a suggestion. They use overdrive for their audiobooks, so why not add eBooks to the repertoire? Money. The response was as follows:

“[The Libraries] made a decision to keep the focus to audiobooks at this time because the budget for the collections we purchase for use with this service is very limited and [we] don’t want to dilute the value we are providing in audio content, and no additional funds for ebook format have been made available.”

I can respect the funding issue, especially given the budget cuts that surround us. But I don’t think adding eBooks to the collection would dilute the audio collection. Certainly it would if you gut the audio section, but this is about collection management. Everyone knows that not every audiobook you buy (or every print book for that matter) is sought after. I have seen some audiobooks that have only been checked out 3 or 4 times in the course of a year. The same goes for printed books. So for a Library to say they don’t want to damage the audio content collection seems a little of base to me. Further more, it alienates the “new” reader who might not have used the Library before.

Maybe the new reader is used to purchasing books from Amazon or some other vendor and reading them on their new eBook reader. What if you offered them to check it out FOR FREE at the public library. Just as simple as purchasing it online, and you can count it as a book circulation just like those audiobooks. Why not?

How can Libraries provide what their patrons want if they aren’t willing to take a risk and offer it? Who knows, they might find eBooks check out more than audiobooks. But if you don’t offer it you’ll never know. As for me, this Librarian who is pretty darn inclined to use his public library, now has one less reason to.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 10:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.