> In short, I absolutely love it. I have discovered that for the first time I can read--and enjoy--a digital book that I have downloaded.
I too have to admit my attitude towards ebooks is changing. My older attitude was rooted in two things:
1. the difference between electronic texts, ebooks, and physical books [1, 2]
2. the misconception of proprietary ebook formats
I have since learned that just about all of the ebook readers support both PDF and epub file formats. [3] This means ebook content is not necessarily tied to particular ebook hardware. This means a person is not limited to the content distributed by ebook hardware vendors or commercial publishers. Anybody -- any library -- can be an ebook publisher. With this in mind I have started experimenting with ways to convert my TEI files -- all of my writings and presentations are saved as TEI files -- into epub documents. [4]
I think we, as librarians, need to keep in mind that there are multiple types of reading material. Compare and contrast Twitter tweets, Facebook wall postings, email messages, blog postings, newspaper articles, magazine articles, scholarly articles, popular literature, reference manuals, scholarly tomes, etc. Each example has a different length, a different purpose, a different scope, and a different audience. Personally, I think ebook readers, especially if they are connected to the network, are particularly amenable to the reading of postings, articles, or parts of reference manuals such as dictionary definitions or encyclopedia entries. I still have problems reading novel-length materials on ebook readers. "Big ideas don't fit on my mobile."
We should not get hung up on the physical thing called a book -- a codex. It has many useful characteristics. Portable. Technologically independent. Long lasting. Easy to browse through. Cheap. At the same time, it has a number of limitations. It can only exist in one place at one time, and thus it is not easily sharable. Comparatively, it is difficult to duplicate. A book, compared to other media, is written in a "code" called a "language" and its contents are only accessible to those people who know the code.
I have always believed that libraries are not about books. Nor are they about computers. Rather, they are about what is inside the books and the computers. The data. The information. The ideas. The knowledge. If this is true, then libraries need to figuring how ways to collect, organize, preserve, and disseminate these things using whatever technology is most apropos. Sometimes a codex might be the best solution. Other times it might be epub files.
P.S. Ironically, I very recently had the opportunity to see Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg fame give a presentation. He seems to be very much into electronic texts and doesn't care how they get read. [5]
[1] older ebook technology - http://infomotions.com/musings/ebooks/
[2] writing in books - http://infomotions.com/musings/emerging-technologies/
[3] epub - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
[4] epub hacks - http://infomotions.com/tmp/epub-2010-03-01.zip
[5] Michael Hart - http://infomotions.com/blog/2010/03/michael-hart-in-roanoke-indiana/
--
Eric Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Fri Mar 12 2010 - 09:33:51 EST