It's winter in CNY - we might as well enjoy it!

Wise words...

"I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."
Eudora Welty

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Growing popularity of eReaders

Eavesdrop on any group of librarians and you're likely to hear some discussion of eReaders.  Many of us love the convenience of our Kindles, Nooks, or Sony Readers. We read stacks of print books of course, but since we're likely to be compulsive readers, not happy unless we have a selection with us, and spares for when we finish the book we're currently reading, the technology meets our needs in a lot of ways.

The questions that worry us? What does the increasing popularity of eReaders mean for the future of public libraries?  And how can we meet the needs of our patrons who are becoming converts?  As a librarian and lifetime reader it warms my heart to read the discussions in the Kindle forums - these are READERS!  They discuss books with great enthusiasm.  They recommend titles and sources for free and low-cost ebooks, they discuss the publishing industry and they are excited about new and newly discovered authors.  We don't want to lose them as library supporters. 

Librarians should be out front of the efforts to get the publishing industry to come up with a standard format and a user-friendly way to market ebooks to libraries so that we can lend them, alongside print books, magazines, and the CD's, Playaways, DVD's,etc.that have enriched our collections.

There is an interesting article about the dramatic increase in sales of ebooks in this morning's New York Times.  Take a look....http://tiny.cc/1nlq8



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