04-17-2010, 06:19 PM | #1 |
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Is there a librarian in the house?
OR
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Libraries have books. That’s understandable, it's their raison d'être. My first contact with audiobooks was in helping to care for an old priest with a stroke. I also learned (back in the mid '70s) that they were used by the blind. So it is understandable that libraries provide paper books and audiobooks. But ebooks? As mentioned elsewhere ereaders are not that common. I would like to add "yet", but I don't know that there is, truly, a large percentage of readers interested in ereader devices. So a library must decide how to spend its' money. Paper books, yes. Audio books, yes. Magazine and newspaper subscriptions, yes. Money left over? Not much. Ebooks? Not much of a demand right now. The chicken or the egg. Libraries don't have many ebooks so people don't look for them there. But can we change that? It looks like many people here have taken much time to clean up "out of copyright" books. The question to Mobileread and those dedicated people is this - Can this collection be "donated" to libraries? |
04-18-2010, 08:36 PM | #2 |
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Depends, I suspect at least some of the uploads here were done so with the shorter Canadian Copyright. Can a library in the USA legally lend those out as Ebooks?
Better yet for a fairly minimal sum I believe that Project Gutenburg will burn disks of ebooks. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenb...nd_DVD_Project "Project Gutenberg periodically generates CD and DVD image files (ISO files) containing books from the collection. When downloaded, they can be used to make a CD or DVD using a CD or DVD writer. Please copy and give away these CDs and DVDs! Keep one for yourself, and give one to a friend … or a library … or a school. " The July 2006 DVD contains over 17,000 books from our first 19,000 titles. That would be a very easy, low cost way for any Library to get started with Ebook's. |
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04-18-2010, 09:17 PM | #3 |
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Good idea. What about it librarians?
Are the "Project Gutenberg" ebooks as good as the ones here on MR? |
04-19-2010, 11:54 AM | #4 |
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why would someone borrow a Guttenberg ebook?
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04-19-2010, 12:35 PM | #5 |
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A lot of libraries use management services like overdrive to maintain their eBook collections, so I don't know that donating a CD to the library itself would accomplish anything.
The best way to get your library to increase its eBook selection would be to write them a nice letter telling them how much you would like to see some additional books available in that format. |
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04-19-2010, 12:52 PM | #6 |
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When it comes to ebooks as well as audiobooks, you will see libraries form consortiums. My local library belongs to a consortium that includes 50 other libraries. Each library in the consortium donates a small share so collectively they can amass a larger collection that is shared by all.
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04-19-2010, 02:38 PM | #7 |
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Many people new to MR ask where to get "free" books. Not all of them mean pirate websites.
I just checked out the PD ebooks in the Philadelphia Pub. Library. Ebooks like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are from Penguin Group USA and others. It still seems like a way to bolster public libraries at a time when most governments are cutting budgets. |
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