RE: article on ebooks for libraries

["Nat Gustafson-Sundell" <n-gustafson-sundell@northwestern.edu>]

Just because they say it doesn't make it so.  This will be useful 
for textbooks, but libraries aren't generally in the business of 
supplying textbooks or canonical works for undergrad humanities 
studies.  For other resources, the impact will be slight:  just 
look at how nominal fees for printing impact article printing by 
students.  They'll choose free and available over any sort of 
nuisance.  Most research resource needs will likely require 
intermediation by libraries for a while yet. Of course, brick and 
mortar bookstores might disappear along with slow moving 
publishers and distributors (see the recent NY Times article) if 
or as ebook options continue to improve, but the library is 
likely to continue to adapt. E-journals provide a good point of 
comparison -- if it turns out that commercial interests cause 
failures (or simply nuisances) in service to the scholarly 
community, then we can expect libraries to step in as necessary 
and actually become more involved than less involved.  Actually, 
I overheard a vendor rep at the ALA talking about how much 
interest they were seeing from libraries in new e-book purchasing 
and access options...

I guess this means we won't have to worry about new off-site 
storage facilities every couple of years, but how will we deal 
with the need to re-charge all those batteries?

-Nat


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 6:59 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: article on ebooks for libraries

Interesting blog post on various ebook projects that are in the 
works.  The article in particular praises the U. of Chicago Press 
for its use of Adobe Digital Editions.  The piece includes this 
quotation:

"What harried undergrad or professor wouldn't pay a small fee to 
bypass their library and quickly download an essential book?"

Here again the recurrent theme, the trend toward moving libraries
to the periphery of scholarly communications.

Here is the link: http://bit.ly/qMfyv

Joe Esposito