Thing 9: eBooks

I have seen plenty of people using eReaders, but had never even touched one before last week when I played with a few at Staples while waiting for the copy shop to print out an oversize poster for me to bring to the New York Archives Conference.  Sure, I would certainly be thrilled to get one as a gift, and one would certainly be handy to have when traveling, but this cheap and overloaded librarian has never felt a need to seek one out.  For now, free hard copy books from the library are serving my needs just fine.  As for traveling, I got a bunch of books for only a few cents each at Albany Public Library's Book Ends sale a few weeks ago.  I can lose, drop, or mutilate these books however I please with no worries, and I don't have to be concerned about the airport metal detector messing with them.

I can see eReaders being most useful for textbooks.  Textbooks are usually huge, and students often have to carry several around at a time.  Even so, I approach eReaders with caution for students younger than college age.  I have read many articles lately stating that we should be giving all students laptops or iPads or eReaders or whatever to enhance their learning experience.  Setting aside the fact that schools these days are having trouble scrounging up enough money for toilet paper, I think this idea is idealizing the level of responsibility of kids.  Here are a few stories I've heard from parents and kids in the past few months to show what I mean:

• A sixth grader sets her Nintendo DS on fire because she's mad about losing a game.
• A ninth grader loses his phone one day after getting it on the first day of school.  He is now on his fifth phone, even though he buys them with his own money.
• A 7th grader breaks a fan by sticking scissors in it for no particular reason.
• All the lights in a school hallway continually are turned off after students accidentally discover that sticking their bus passes in an outlet will cause this to happen.  (Why would you stick your bus pass in an outlet, you ask?  You obviously haven't spent much time in middle school.)

The above stories did not involve students perpetually in detention.  These are all relatively well-behaved honors students.  I really think that until eReaders become more indestructible AND include GPS tracking devices, they should not be distributed to young students wide scale, unless whoever is providing them has lots of money and time to burn.

But on to the assignment part of Thing 9.  I approached this with much trepidation.  I have heard lots of stories from librarians much more tech savvy than I about their feelings of inadequacy when helping patrons with ebook issues. (Or eBooks?  Why do I want to capitalize the "B"?)    Not only does every device work differently and interface slightly differently with the library software, but each version of the devices has changes that can affect the downloading.  I have heard that it is not uncommon for library staff to be unable to solve all a patron's ebook problems.

I easily found the ebooks section of the Albany Public Library's web site.  However, I use this site practically every day, so I knew that the "readers services" link was the most likely place to find ebooks.  This might not be so obvious, or obvious at all, to less frequent users of the web site.  I don't know that putting this information on the library's home page would be much better, though.  This weekend I visited Bethlehem Public Library's home page to look up their hours, and found their home page just as difficult to navigate because it had too much information on their home page.  A library just can't win when it comes to web page design, I guess.

The next step was finding a book to download.  This might have been the most difficult part of the assignment. The search function was not as robust as the catalog.  (Ebooks are listed in the catalog, but, at least as far as I can tell, you cannot limit your search to ebooks.  This feature may be coming soon as ebooks become more popular.)  Once I got the hang of browsing, I discovered that, indeed, ebooks are popular!  Almost all of them were already checked out.  Now, it is hardly fair to compare ebook holdings to print holdings since there are under 3,0000 ebooks in the collection and tens of thousands of print books, but I can say with certainty that there is demand for the library to spend more resources on ebooks.

Once I finally found a book to check out, the process was relatively simple.  I had to download some Adobe software onto my computer first, and I should be able to use this software for future ebook library loans.  Because Adobe is a very well-known and well-respected company in the computer industry, I had no qualms about downloading the software.  I would likely have been more cautious if the software had an unknown name.  Once I had the software loaded, my ebook downloaded in a matter of seconds.  I was quite impressed.  It took less time for a 200+ page book to download than it takes for the three songs I usually download from Freegal  - another great library service - every week.  I know sound files take up a lot of space, but I was still expecting the ebook download to be slower than it was.

Now I have this nifty e-cookbook on my computer for the next 21 days.  I don't have any desire to read a novel on my computer, so I chose a cookbook.  The rights page for the book also tells me that I can print out up to 30 pages, so if I find a good recipe, I can keep it for my files.  The trouble is, I'm not seeing a lot that strikes my fancy.  It looks like I have no way to return the book before my 21 days are up, so I am keeping others from using this book even though I am likely done with it.  I have read in the library literature that some libraries and/or vendors are working on ways for patrons to authorize early returns.  I think it will be great to implement this as soon as possible, given the huge popularity of library ebooks.

Thanks for this lesson on ebooks.  I now see that they are fairly easy to use and have a lot of potential.  Library patrons are thrilled that libraries are entering the ebook world, and we should find ways to do more for our patrons in this area.  For me, personally, however, I still think I would rather use the $100+ that an eReader costs for a day at the spa.