IMHO, I think the academic libraries will go down the road first, see
http://www.dawsonera.com/ for an idea of how this might be done.
Drivers that might motivate the public libraries: you can read an ebook at
varying text sizes, no longer stuck with the large print publication;
interlibrary loans are a thing of the past with the ebook, and the cost that
goes with them (maybe the British Library will be the first library to loan
ebooks for this reason, and for the nation); ebooks should, at least in
theory be cheaper.
However there is one big caveat to all this. The technology is still not
quite there. In the words of an academic librarian I met on Second Life,
ebook readers don't as yet render in colour, and the resolution is not yet
high enough. I'd add they also take between one and two seconds to render a
page, the transfer of information to a human is just plain a lot faster
using a real book.
Maybe real books will become the preserve of the rich, while the rest of us
have to make do with ebooks. (Maybe not.)
I know of one library manager who suggests that the library of the future
will be all ebooks and ebook readers, I'd add with maybe just the British
library serving ebooks to everyone.
Gareth Osler
Admin. and editor, Library Web
http://www.libraryweb.info
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