[New-hampshire-students] Does the Brain Like E-Books?

[Marie Johnson]

Oopps, sorry if you already saw this once! I didn't see that John had posted 
it earlier.


Does the Brain Like E-Books?

So You Want to Borrow an E-Book ... (October 14, 2009)
Michael C. Weimar for The New York Times
The Lee County Library System's e-books Web site.
The lure? Electronic books she can download to her laptop. Beginning earlier 
this year, Ms. Lambert, a 19-year-old community college student in New Port 
Richey, Fla., borrowed volumes in the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" 
series, "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold and a vampire novel by Laurell K. 
Hamilton, without ever visiting an actual branch.
"I can just go online and type my library card number in and look through 
all the books that they have," said Ms. Lambert, who usually downloads from 
the comfort of her bedroom. And, she added, "It's all for free."
Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing 
popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are 
expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.
The idea is to capture borrowers who might not otherwise use the library, as 
well as to give existing customers the opportunity to try new formats.
"People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it's a 
perception we're always trying to fight," said Michael Colford, director of 
information technology at the Boston Public Library. "If we don't provide 
this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library 
altogether."
About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally 
downloadable audio books. The collections are still tiny compared with print 
troves. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-book 
titles, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of 
digital books represent less than 1 percent of the library's overall 
acquisition budget.
But circulation is expanding quickly. The number of checkouts has grown to 
more than 1 million so far this year from 607,275 in all of 2007, according 
to OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries. NetLibrary, 
another provider of e-books to about 5,000 public libraries and a division 
of OCLC, a nonprofit library service organization, has seen circulation of 
e-books and digital audio books rise 21 percent over the past year.
Together with the Google books settlement - which the parties are modifying 
to satisfy the objections of the Department of Justice and others - the 
expansion of e-books into libraries heralds a future in which more reading 
will be done digitally.
"As young people become used to reading virtually everything online," said 
Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, "that is going to 
propel a change in terms of readership of e-books rather than readership of 
physical books."
For now, the expansion will be slowed partly because, with few exceptions, 
e-books in libraries cannot be read on Amazon's Kindle, the best-selling 
electronic reader, or on Apple's iPhone, which has rapidly become a popular 
device for reading e-books. Most library editions are compatible with the 
Sony Reader, computers and a handful of other mobile devices.
Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one 
borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons 
must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three 
weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader's account.
But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books 
electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.
"I don't have to get in my car, go to the library, look at the book, check 
it out," said John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, which publishes 
authors like Janet Evanovich, Augusten Burroughs and Jeffrey Eugenides. 
"Instead, I'm sitting in the comfort of my living room and can say, 'Oh, 
that looks interesting' and download it."
As digital collections grow, Mr. Sargent said he feared a world in which 
"pretty soon you're not paying for anything." Partly because of such 
concerns, Macmillan does not allow its e-books to be offered in public 
libraries.
Simon & Schuster, whose authors include Stephen King and Bob Woodward, has 
also refrained from distributing its e-books to public libraries. "We have 
not found a business model that works for us and our authors," said Adam 
Rothberg, a spokesman.
For now, the advent of e-book borrowing has not threatened physical 
libraries by siphoning away visitors because the recession has driven so 
many new users seeking free resources through library doors. And in some 
cases, few library patrons seem to know that e-book collections even exist.
In the Brooklyn Public Library system recently, eight people were waiting 
for three digital copies of "The Lost Symbol," Dan Brown's follow-up to "The 
Da Vinci Code," while 715 people were waiting for 526 print copies.
Some librarians suggest that because digital books never wear out, take up 
no shelf space and could, in theory, be read by multiple people at the same 
time, the purchasing model for e-books should be different than it is for 
print.