I was just beginning to relax with e-books and maintain some hope the e-books the library has available will meet the demands of patrons receiving e-readers and iPads over Christmas, but last Monday I read an article entitled “Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War” on the New York Times website and I am back to being extremely annoyed at publishers’ greed and can’t help but think our future is a bit more hazy.
Our cost for 2011 will be $1,200 for the less than stellar set of ebooks and audiobooks made available to the province. I don’t mind that at all if it is useful and a benefit to the library. I do, however, also have to maintain my book purchasing level for those who prefer the actual book, and because patrons will never find recent best sellers among the available e-book titles.
The Times article verifies what I said a few columns ago about e-books, “Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.”
It’s too late now, as Christmas 2011 is now Christmas past, but you might want to think about the purchase of an e-reader for yourself, family or friends. If that e-reader is a Kindle of any kind, the owner has to purchase books for it and they cannot download a library e-book. Unless you or the person you are buying for already purchased the books they read then you might even save some money. If not, then the books they now have to purchase will be an added strain on a probably already tight budget.
You also cannot pass those books to anyone else to read nor can you donate them to the library or get credit at Kingfisher Books when you have finished with it. The book will sit in the reader and then what? When the batteries go or the reader becomes obsolete, it and the books in it merely become more techno junk.
If you are thinking about the other e-readers, you also have to consider what is available from the library and I will be the first person to tell you the selection is terrible, the wait time can be weeks and weeks, and then the book cannot be renewed if you don’t have the time to read it and you will have to wait again. Again, to derive the most satisfaction from your new e-reader, you are going to have to spend money and purchase those books you want to read. You can’t do that locally, and you can’t share the book when you are done or trade it in on another book.
The Healdsburg Regional Library in Sonoma County, Calif., is looking for a wine librarian. Who knew there was such a thing as a wine librarian? I might have thought about applying for such a position; however, most of the work involves digitizing their print holdings for remote access, and working on a computer all day is not something I see in my future. I did, however, come up with an idea for a partnership I think bears exploring.
In the description of the Sonoma County Wine Library, it is stated, “We have been working these past several years on making pictorial and text material available in a digital library setting where users from Cotati to Cote du Rhone can access the materials from the web. … The library staff answers thousands of inquiries from the industry and researchers as well as the wine loving public.”
I know Petra and Bob at Baillie-Grohman and Dave with Wynnwood Cellars (Sirdar) are always looking for ways and methods on how to better their already fine wines, which leads me to think our own little burgeoning wine industry in Creston could benefit from access to Wine library information. I wonder if the Okanagan and Similkameen wine industry might not also benefit from a partnership of some kind with the wine library.
Much to my chagrin and I suspect theirs, the financial situation for California libraries is dire and not only was the library system closed until the new year, the website was also closed. No transactions of any kind, no information available, nothing but a closed message. I will do some exploring of possibilities when library activity returns to normal, theirs and ours.
Ann Day is the chief librarian at the Creston and District Public Library.