Week 9, #22 Can E-books Kindle Readers?

Although they've been available for quite a while, I hadn't known anyone who personally owned an Amazon Kindle until last week. My acquaintance, who is a minimal user of technology, is very excited about the opportunity to have books delivered to him and to have the ability to store so many books in one small place. He likes the idea of reading anywhere (as opposed to reading from a laptop that you can't physically take quite as many places) and he likes that Amazon will let you remove but later re-download a purchased book. In the short time we talked before a meeting, I didn't have a chance to try it for myself but I will soon as our public library has purchased at least one.

In PA, we've had netLibrary as a part of our state-supplied databases for several years. Many kids think it is cool to have a whole book on the computer, but fewer chose it as a source when given the freedom to select their own sources. I know that academic libraries use ebooks, particularly in the computer field; therefore, I try to expose the students to using them. If I had to say why they avoid the e-books, I would list two reasons: one is that they feel Google is faster; two is that they just don't have access to the widest variety of ebooks.

The links in this lesson show the many books students can use. Project Gutenberg is one of the older projects for digitizing books. Consisting of mostly books out of copyright, Gutenberg preserves the classics but loses appeal to the youth because of the age of the materials. It's the same with Internet Archive, which seemed to have a great screen appearance and good searching ability. Ebooks About Everything had some high prices for book downloads ($180.00!) which makes it impractical for HS students.
The British Public Library books were awesome looking on the screen! However, I had some problems getting the audio to work on the few I tried. I will have to explore those in more depth.

I've been introducing my students to Google books and to the some of the university projects such as Universal Digital Library from Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.ulib.org/)and MBooks, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Google (http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/). While they have some of the same drawbacks of Project Gutenberg (dated materials), they have many books that are excerpted with links to purchase. I like to get the students to discuss why anyone would put his/her book free online, in part or in whole.

I've also tried promoting audiobooks. My student library advisory council suggested we buy audiobooks and promote them. I let the students choose the format and the titles. They chose CD format b/c they felt that not all students had an MP3 player, but those who did could "rip and burn." Those who didn't have an MP3 player could listen on a computer. They decided against Playaways because they could get twice as many books on CDs as on Playaways. Their selections were a mix of popular YA novels and books used in English classes. While we've been trying for a year to gain readership, we've not been successful. Students will wait for a paper copy of Twilight rather than take the audiobook. Teachers have used some of the audiobooks in classes, especially in the learning support room. We have only a handful of ESL students but I would like to be sure they know about all of the titles. As MP3 players are forbidden in our school, I have to promote audiobooks for home use only, which is a drawback.

I believe that future libraries will have a huge amount of digitized texts so that patrons can access them remotely at all hours. Presently, I use ancestry.com to research census files. The Mormon Library is in the process of digitzing their microfilm collection--millions of rolls. We've had digitized magazine articles for years. Books are the next step.

It just might take me a while to adjusting to reading a book on my computer in the bubble bath.....