Recently, one of my colleagues here at HPL made a good case for e-books and e-readers as circulating items at our library. The general idea: Why not purchase any extra copies of upcoming bestsellers in e-format and load them on circulating e-readers? We already have a terrible overcrowding problem in our adult fiction collection especially. Many times, we are forced to move extra copies into our basement storage area. This practice means extra steps (literally) for staff to retrieve books and extra wait time for patrons. The purchase of a number of readers - maybe Nooks or Sonys could solve this (I don't think Amazon's Kindle would cut it for this purpose, although I could be wrong).
Certainly, the devices are individually more pricey than a hardback book. But it wouldn't take many copies of bestselling titles to get up into the $149-$199 range. The readers could hold a large number of titles and take up a minuscule amount of space. We could begin to thin out our "overflow" storage and beef up our ability to meet immediate demand. Sure, we take a risk that the readers might be damaged or never return, but we take that risk with books, DVDs, and CDs hundreds of thousands of times per year. Hmm...sounds like a new project.
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