I am no prophet, but I sure can ramble on...

AUGH!  MY EYES!

For a over a decade, ebooks were something of a curiosity.  They never quite caught on, mainly because the content was far ahead of the delivery device.  No one wanted to sit in front of an old CRT monitor to read a book.

Then LCD monitors became widely available and at least you could read an ebook without destroying your vision.  But still, the ebook wasn't quite ready.  People still did not want to be stuck at a desk to read.  Even lounging with a laptop to read a book was not really that great.

But which one do I buy???

And then a few years back, the ebook reader was born.  A small, lightweight device with enough memory to store a lot of books and a display (e-ink, especially) that was easy on the eyes.  When combined with retail juggernauts like Amazon, who could afford to sell the devices at a loss because they knew they would make it up in content, ebooks have taken off.

So what, right?  Libraries can just buy a big bunch of ebooks and check them out through their own websites or catalogs or what ever.  Were it only that easy.  It didn't turn out that way.  Suddenly, libraries that had been dealing with those little computer files for years found themselves cut out of the market.  Publishers began treating "books" like the music industry and the software industry treat their content - as licensed things rather than purchased copies of things.  Add to that the problem that there are very few companies that cater to the library market when it comes to ebooks.  There are OverDrive, the up-start 3M Cloud, Baker& Taylor's Blio, and a few others, but mostly there are the big publishers with their newly-bared disdain for libraries.  That disdain, long-held (and in my opinion irrationally so) in the form of a "Public Library Loans = Lost Sales" mentality, is a big problem for libraries and ultimately for literacy and the legacy of accumulated knowledge of our culture.

What's a library to do though?  Little old HPL can't muster the monetary resources to change the tide...or can it?  The answer is:  Maybe.  There is a library system in Colorado that is blazing a new trail, the Douglas County Libraries.  They are negotiating their own contracts with publishers - not any of the "Big Six" so far - but many good publishing houses.  They are negotiating to purchase copies of the electronic files that constitute ebooks and making agreements with the publishers to circulate them and protect them from copyright violation just as libraries have done with paper books for centuries.

Maybe we can do this too at HPL.  I honestly believe that this is the path into the future for libraries everywhere and that we MUST do it.  Libraries must retake their position in the world of the "printed" word.  This article from the journal Public Libraries outlines much more clearly than I can what must happen in the very near future.  I think it must happen in many libraries and at all levels.

And in the spirit of rambling, here's an article outlining some reasons why we might NOT want to throw out those darned old paper books.  A new Library of Alexandria in Richmond, California?