#22 Ebooks

Jumping ahead here as I only have dial up at home and can't listen to podcasts without it stopping and starting as it tries to work. So podcasts will have to wait till I'm at work. I can see a huge place in libraries for Ebooks. Isn't this what we are all about, providing access to books 24 hours a day! The idea of it disappearing from your mp3 player once the download time has expired is brilliant. No more agro borrowers with overdues! This is also a great way to access books no longer in print, much easier than interlibrary loans and I can see that this would be a way to free up more library space if all the books we hold in stacks could be easily accessed as ebooks we would no longer need to keep them as hard copy. I think ebooks can complement hard copy collections and I don't see the ebooks taking over completely because it is still much nicer to relax with a hard copy than an ebook. But for research purposes and those hard to find hard copy books I think this is wonderful. We already to some degree do use ebooks when you think about our access to britannica on line and also some of the reference encyclopedias which we access via databases. I can see that a lot of our reference materials would work well as ebooks

I can also see a place for Mp3 audio books, particularly as tapes are on there way out and this will provide another format for those who want to listen to a book.