Madison Library

As you may imagine, the hot topic among librarians right now is ebooks. Our major concern is publishers’ stopping (or never starting) to allow libraries to purchase or license ebooks at the same time we’re seeing a huge increase in the number of people who own ereaders. This means that availability of ebooks for library borrowing is limited and users are experiencing long waiting lists for popular titles. Here’s some local info and background information:

The Madison Library provides ebooks through our membership in NH Downloadable Books. Read more explaining this.

Some statistics: The number of Americans who own a tablet computer or ereader jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January (Pew Internet and American Life report.) The number of ebooks checked out using Madison’s NH Downloadable Books service has gone from 48 in January 2011 to 75 in January 2012, a 76% increase. Last month, 33 individuals used the service (which also includes audiobooks), the most in one month since we started offering it. For perspective, in January 2012, 177 individuals came into the library and checked something out with their library card. Last January, the numbers were 17 downloadable users, and 198 people checking something out in person.

Does this mean print books are going away? Not in the foreseeable future. Most of our library members who read books are still borrowing and enjoying print books (See numbers in the paragraph above for evidence of this). But, if we have a single request for a new book that we haven’t yet purchased in print, and it is available as an ebook from NH Downloadable Books, we will ask you to borrow the ebook and read it on one of our ereaders. The Madison Library currently has two ereaders that may be checked out to use with the ebooks the library offers through NH Downloadable Books (see policy). You can also check one out to test drive the experience of reading with an ereader.

The difference between ebooks and print books: The only thing they really have in common is the writer and the reader. In between is where authors’ agents, publishers, producers, distributors, booksellers, and librarians work to bring the two together. A print book is a tangible object, it can be bought, lent, read and handled by one person at a time. Because ebooks are digital files, they can potentially be used by an unlimited number of users unless some sort of control is put into place. It is these control systems, along with user confidentiality measures that libraries insist upon, that make borrowing an ebook from your library more complicated than if you bought it directly from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Working out how to protect publishers’ and authors’ rights and still provide library lending of the digital files is going on now, with frequent shifts of philosophies and policies (like a publisher refusing to sell ebooks to libraries). What will hopefully happen before too long is a decision on a way to provide econtent to library members in a  seamless way that gives publishers the assurance that licenses offer while still providing user privacy consistent with library policies.

The “digital divide”: For librarians, this is a real concern. Providing information services to the public is libraries’ mission, and making that happen increasingly means that the method of providing that information is digital and requires a digital device. Much like offering access to public computers, libraries need to offer ereaders so that all of the public may have access to all of the library’s information.