CIL 2011 - Day 2 - Ebooks & Their Growing Value for Libraries

This presentation was really 3 presentations featuring 5 presenters and covering two timeslots in the schedule.

The first presentation was made by Amy Pawlowski from Cleveland Public Library & Sue Polanka from Bright State University Libraries. They provided an overview of the eBook situation and provided public library and academic library perspectives. The notable points from the public library perspective (which is what I was most interested in) were:

The Public Library Future

• 72% of Public Libraries are offering eBooks

• 5% of public libraries circulate preloaded ereading devices, while 24% are considering it. Kindle was the top device.

• Currently only 1/5 of the US Online population reads at least two books per month

• If you buy 1 eBook from Amazon for $9.99 a week for an entire year you'll spend about $520, some of which you could be saving by downloading books from the library.

Value for Libraries

• 24/7 access anywhere

• Econtent meets users where they are

• Shelf/Storage Space

• Expanding free content to our users

• Staying current/relevant by delivering a service to a growing demographic

  • eReader & Tablet Market

  • Mobile Market

How to position your library

• The waiting is over
• Know the platforms and products and how they workstationsStart planning for the future now
• Create programming around devices/service
• Consider circulating devices to help those who are looking to purchase in the future
• Come up with a plan for collection development
• Decide where your eBook budget dollars best fit into your library's budget
• Train
• Market

Following this presentation was a presentation done by Ellen Druda and Rosemarie Jerome from Half Hallow Hills Community Library. They described their efforts in using eReaders with reading clubs and their summer reading program. The reading club effort was interesting as they had a discussion of iDrakula by Bekka Black, and iPhone App/eReader reworking of Dracula in modern times. Based on their virtualization of their adult summer reading program registration from last year (and a considerable boost of participation as a result) they are now taking that even further and this year are planning a summer reading program where it is completely unnecessary to step into the library during the entire program. People will be able to register online, download ebooks, and post reviews of ebooks from home, in addition to the more conventional summer reading club options. It will be interesting to see how successful this is.

The last presentation of the session was done by Bianca Crowley of the Smithsonian Institution. It addressed the Biodiversity Heritage Library's digitization project where in concert with archive.org they have put the contents of hundreds of books in the collections of member institutions online. In it she described some of the issues they've had with metadata. It was most interesting to me just to know that it was there.