Foote (2011)

Foote, C. (2011). E-books: Just Jump In!. Library Media Connection, 29(4), 58-9. Retrieved October 23, 2011, from Library & Information Science database.

Foote's report on her initial efforts to incorporate ebooks into her high school library collection provides a number of useful tips and generates some questions ...

• Student needs must be the point of departure. Foote notes that parents and students are becoming attached to Kindles and iPads. What are the implications for a high school library? We probably need to deliver ebooks to them with a device they are already using, but we probably can't support every platform.
  
• Foote says it is probably better to start small with the best hunches and build from there than to try to do too much before you have the experience to know what's best.
• Define the areas within the collection that make the most sense to promote first. For me that seems like YA fiction, since that's what students read most; what about Ms. Friesen's list of American classics? I wonder how many of them are available on Google Books? Would offering them on ereaders make them more attractive to students?
• Fortunately she discusses her experiences with Follett, which provides the ebooks we already have in the catalog. Issue: They must be read on an Internet-connected device. What options do our students have for that? Computers at home and at school, but that's not going to be the best way to read for most of them. How many have iPads? How many have smart phones? Probably not a lot.
• Advantage of Follett system: The ebooks are right there in the catalog with all the print materials. Easy for students to encounter.
• Gale offers a lot of non-fiction ebooks.
• EBSCO has purchased NetLibrary, which seems to function similarly to Follett.
• Purchasing ereaders: Expensive, but prices are dropping. Content usually resides on the ereader, so the idea is that the librarian loads the books onto an ereader and if a student wants to read a book you check the ereader out to them.
• "iPads, for instance, can provide the best of both worlds: functioning as an e-reader for content purchased via apps, such as iBook or Kindle apps, and providing a web browser (Safari), which enables access to a wealth of e-book sites" (p. 59) (including Follett ebooks in our catalog).
• Are ereaders a motivational force for students? Seems like it would be very cool to check a book out with an ereader. Even if we only have five or six, I bet they would generate some buzz.
• So, if iPads are the best choice, does one try to monitor or control using it for stuff other than reading books? I can imagine someone checking it out just to have it for a few days, even if one didn't want to read a book.

Quick look on Craig's List indicates the cheapest used iPad is $350. That's getting close to affordable for a pilot project. I think we'd want to have half a dozen. What do we do when one is stolen? What if they all get "stolen" right away? What kind of liability do we warn students about?

Kindles, on the other hand, can be as cheap as $79 new. Since they are only used for ebooks and aren't as cool as iPads, they probably wouldn't disappear as fast as iPads. Quick check with SFPL indicates that they now loan Kindle books. The process is a bit complicated, but what it could mean is that when I can't provide a student with the book they have requested I could walk them through the download from SFPL onto a Burton library Kindle and then hand that to them. Sounds very exciting. From the Amazon site you can also download an SFPL Kindle ebook onto a desktop or laptop computer, an iPad, or a smart phone.