Thing #22: Ebooks and Audiobooks

Due to my current interim Collection Development position, I am more involved with library ebooks than I want to be. It seems to me that ebooks are in a position that databases were when they first became relatively common (about 5 years ago? more? it begins to blur...). In other words, each vendor was more concerned with trumpeting their particular format and how superior it was, and very little concerned about what a disservice they did to libraries and patrons by the incompatibility of formats, the fact that they didn't talk to each other, and the complexity of getting access. Now almost every database is accessed by IP address and a proxy server, we (at SJSU anyway) use Get Text (SFX, Open URL) to link most of them together, and access to all these varied databases is much more seamless to the patron and usually requires nothing more than a mouse click and/or entering a name/ID/PIN. I can only hope that in another 5 years (or less!) ebooks will look that way. Right now they give me a headache--I can only imagine how the poor patrons feel.

Kudos to Brian for his redesign of the ebooks pages, which has really helped make our variety appear less confusing--and being able to search all the ebook collections at once is a great boon to University users especially. Ebooks are a great idea, even if the practice has a long way to go. For a commuter school that also has a lot of distance learners, they're a great timesaver. They're also a great way to deal with the theft problem. I remember when we used to buy things like computer manuals they never even had a chance to collect dust before they were stolen--and if they weren't stolen they went out of date and cluttered up the shelves. Ebooks are a great solution for that. I still can't imagine curling up with a cat, a cup of tea, and a mystery ebook--but that will someday change when somebody develops a really good reader with long battery life and print-equivalent resolution. Although I'm nearsighted, I'm much more so in one eye than the other, so as I get tireder I tend to close my farsighted eye to read. As my dear mother (just about everybody's mother, actually) used to say--"Your face will freeze like that!" A decent ebook reader would just let me make the print bigger as I got tireder!

I'm looking forward to exploring both our library's audiobooks and others after I (a) retire and (b) get broadband. Having a partner with a visual disability makes me sensitive to the advantages of audiobooks. I really want to research what's out there so I can get some for her. Another thing I may break down and do next year is (c) get an MP3 player for audiobooks on the go. As I told Rob & Peggy last Friday during a hallway discussion, it's not that I'm a Luddite, it just takes so much time to research what to buy and then go find it. One sad fact about getting--shall we say, less young?--is that it just takes you longer to do stuff. So you end up never having enough time to do all the stuff you want to do in a given amount of time. Just you wait until I don't have work getting in the way!

The more variety in how you make information available the better. I like words on a page, preferably in a format I can easily carry around. Like I said in my last post, I'm very visual in how I learn ang get information. Other people like to hear it; other people learn more by doing. The thing to remember when all these formats threaten to drive us crazy, is what a good thing it is for the variety of learners out there.