Clark begins this case study by noting: "This is the first study on e-book reader lending services in libraries" (p. 146).
Clark says the Kindle was introduced in 2007 and at the time of his writing was criticized for limiting its use to titles processed by and purchased from Amazon. The earliest libraries to loan Kindles used one of two processes for title acquisition: (1) Loaned an empty Kindle and paid the downloading fee for the book the patron wanted to read; (2) Pre-loaded the Kindle with titles the library had selected.
Clark references his own earlier article that involved a study of student use of 40 Kindles that his library purchased:
"... the investigators concluded that the Kindle is an effective device for basic popular reading, but has limited value for academic reading because of poor graphics, high cost and limited content (Clark et al., 2008)" (p. 147).At the end of this study they created a program to lend Kindles to patrons, and that experience is the basis of this study.
They followed a patron-driven model for acquisitions: Any title a patron requested that was under $150 was added to a Kindle. Titles were requested through a Web form. They put a limit of three requests on each patron (for each loan period?) and set a loan period of two weeks. At the time of this writing, at least, Amazon allowed a title to be downloaded to six Kindles linked to the same Amazon account.
They marketed the program heavily and concluded that it was very popular. Thirty request for Kindles came in the first day and at the end of the first month there was a waiting list of 108 patrons. Since they marketed the program for general reading, they were not surprised that light fiction was the largest category among the 62 titles downloaded during the first month. They were surprised that almost as many children's lit books were downloaded.
The program began with 6 Kindles but quickly expanded to 12 and then 18. They reduced the loan period to one week and the limit on titles requested for download to one per patron in order to address the long waiting list.
Interesting comment:
"None of the Kindles were returned damaged nor was there evidence of any tampering with the device or the operating system" (p. 148).
My thoughts
It's a little disappointing, but, ultimately, good news, that there isn't more to report in this study than there is. The bottom line is that the program was quite successful and not all that difficult to implement. Since the library was focusing on general reading rather than scholarly reading, the applicability of this experience to my high school library should be high.
The patron-driven acquisition angle is important to me. Also important is the immediate acquisition of titles, especially newly published volumes in a series that have been anticipated by patrons. It's not clear from the study how the titles become part of the online catalog, but that has probably changed in the last two years anyway. Makes me all the more eager to experiment with the Kindle I bought last week, but since that isn't absolutely necessary for this lit review, it's going to have to wait a bit more.
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