David Rothman Argues For More eBooks In Libraries

EBooks are slowly making their way into libraries and TeleRead Founder David Rothman has a piece in The Atlantic today arguing why this is important.

In the piece titled, “Why We Can’t Afford Not to Create a Well-Stocked National Digital Library System,” Rothman argues that as eReader technology gets cheaper, more widely adopted and is attracting the eyes of a younger generation, libraries will need to evolve and include digital collections to engage readers.

Here is more from the piece: “A library plan and related initiatives should include the actual collections, not just for traditional education and research but also for job training; tight integration with schools, libraries, and other institutions; encouragement of the spread of the right hardware and connections; and the cost-justification described in the stimulus proposal. Multimedia is essential, and Kindle-style tablets will almost surely include color and video in the future, blurring distinctions between them and iPads. But the digital library system mustn’t neglect books and other texts.”

Earlier today, we reported that since August digital distributor to libraries OverDrive had seen more than 100,000 downloads in libraries from its Project Gutenberg collection alone. These numbers will likely grow as the collection rolls out of beta and into full form.

Have you ever checked out a digital book from the library?

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