A couple of weekends ago, we had 3 employees from Best Buy come in to talk to interested patrons about e-readers, and to demonstrate several models. When I mentioned this upcoming program to a couple of people, they were wondering if I had “gone over to the dark side.” After all, shouldn’t I be promoting books? Then I recently got a call from the Berkshire Eagle, essentially asking the same thing.
Libraries have always been on top of the current technology trend. We were there for books on cassette, CD-ROM, VHS, and now DVD, CD, the online subscription database, and the website. (I think we missed eight-track tapes, no loss.) We already have online audiobooks and ebooks, courtesy of our CW MARS suite of services, so if you are interested, be sure to check it out. (By the way, you should know that Amazon’s Kindle is not compatible with our collection, but almost every other e-reader or tablet is. And OverDrive, the vendor of our CW MARS product, is working on a one-click download, coming soon.)
A book is a book, whether print, audio, or electronic, so we are interested in bringing them to you. More than that, an idea is an idea, and there are many ways to express ideas: books, live discussions, music, dance, paintings, and I’m sure you can think of more. When we can, we bring those to you, too. Different people have different learning styles, and respond to different media. Likewise, some media are better than others at bringing an idea across. It is up to libraries, as information hubs, to help people get to the relevant information and ideas, whatever the format.
Will ebooks spell the demise of the codex? I doubt it will happen any time soon, since so many different technologies happily coexist in our library already. For that matter, it took movable type nearly a hundred years to supplant illuminated manuscripts. Books, after all, are a technology, too, one that I can bring into the bath, but I have no interest in doing that with my Nook!