/Rant On

I saw this article on my Facebook feed today: The Book and I: How the iPad has changed my reading life. Mostly, it's a great article. But there was a section that I just had to address, because it's me, and that's what I do. Sadun starts out on this high note: "I am now regularly borrowing books from the Denver Public Library. More and more local library systems are offering digital loans, and many of them deliver directly to the Kindle app."

Yay! Libraries are awesome!

But the author adds this: "Admittedly, library culture hasn't quite caught up to the technology. The collections are often slap-dash and poorly curated....You're generally better off finding recommendations over at Goodreads rather than trying to spontaneously discover items through the library."

Well, not exactly. Libraries were early adopters of ICT (information and communication technologies) and have continued to do their dead-level best, generally, to provide support for a variety of devices and provide information in multiple formats to meet community needs. But ebook publishers, like Simon & Schuster, don't always make it easy for libraries to offer ebooks to patrons.Some publishers don't want libraries to have access to their digital books; they may limit ebooks they'll sell to libraries, and often charge many times the consumer price of an ebook. With distributors, like OverDrive, a library's access to the titles they've "bought" will be revoked should they stop using the service. The distributors also artificially limit the number of "copies" of an ebook that can be checked out at any given time. And patrons enter the distributor's domain when looking for ebooks - all the curation and discovery tools are theirs, not the library's. You can learn more from the ALA or from Information Today, Inc.

To be clear, I love ebooks, particularly for reading escapist fiction. And I'm a big fan of OverDrive and 3M - they do make life easier for libraries, in a lot of ways. I do not want to lose them. But I take issue with anyone blaming the library for ebook issues, and making it out that libraries are somehow behind the times in meeting technology demands. Especially when libraries and librarians have been busy fighting for information access and intellectual freedoms on behalf of their patrons pretty much non-stop.

I love Goodreads, too, and it does a pretty good job recommending books - that's what it's designed to do, after all. But it doesn't compare to the results you'd get with a good reader's adviser.

/rant off

In other news, boy, it sure was cold. I hope that's over for always, now. I need a pretty picture, don't I? Um....here:


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