Coos County Library District to lend Sony Readers

[Nate the great]

They’re not exactly page turners. But soon, patrons of the North Bend Public Library will be able to read books in a new way.

Starting in January, the library will begin checking out three e-book Sony Readers that will let a library user lug hundreds of books in an apparatus that weighs less than a pound.

http://www.theworldlink.com/articles...a640055218.txt

Coos County is in Oregon, in the northwestern USA.

[CCDMan]

Wild. I lived in North Bend for 20 years. Frankly, I am surprised anyone there knows what an e-reader is. The (local) newspaper that the story is in was known far and wide for incorrect facts and mis-spellings!

I hope they are getting a deposit on these things. The area is well-supplied with less than sterling individuals (not uncommon anywhere, I suppose) so I would be surprised if some of the devices did not "grow wings" so-to-speak.

It would seem to me that an appropriate approach would be to only allow long-time (maybe 5 years?) library patrons to take these devices out. They would be more likely to be real reading customers and less likely to be just opportunistic thieves. The article has no details about library e-reader policy (typical of this newspaper as well) so who knows?

Of course, if one does steal an e-reader, they can often be rendered less than 100% useful if the thief attempts to connect to the e-book store, but how many potential thieves know this?

Has anyone had an e-reader stolen and, if so, which kind and how did you and the retailer/manufacturer deal with it? It is something I have thought about while travelling with ours.

[luqmaninbmore]

This type of program is actually not that new. Anne Arundel County in Maryland used to check out the old Rocket Ebook Readers to patrons. You checked out the whole kit, including ac adapter, packaged in a big white cardboard box with a handle. It came preloaded with several recent ebooks. I was already into ebooks before then, but that device gave me my first experience with a dedicated device.

[pampalini]

Coos County Library has an Overdrive account....but strangely enough only for audio books...actually non of the oregon public libraries with overdrive subscriptions has ebooks!...at least 'till now....

[sassanik]

It is actually surprising to me how decent some of the Oregon libraries are. The Clackamas county system is one of the best I have seen. I was shocked at how bad the library system was in Tucson AZ.

Its funny because Medford in Southern Oregon has had severe funding issues and ended up closing its public library. So the state has a fairly large diversity of library systems, from good to not so good.

Hopefully more libraries will be progressive and start offering more ebooks.


Amy

[remnil]

Hi folks,

I actually work at the North Bend Public Library (and was interviewed in the story). We're pretty excited about circulating ebook readers to introduce people to the technology. We're actually not too worried about theft. We've been checking out word processors (that cost about the same as a Sony Reader) for several years with no issue. Other libraries in our district have also been checking out laptops with few problems.

Regarding OverDrive, the consortium of Oregon libraries subscribing to OverDrive recently decided to add ebooks to the subscription (and received a nice grant to build a starting collection). Hopefully, ebooks should be available through that service in March or April. Compatibility with OverDrive was one of the reasons we chose to purchase Sony Readers rather than Kindles.

If you guys have ideas on how/what we should circulate on our new Readers, we'd love to hear them.

Cheers!
Buzzy

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by remnil

If you guys have ideas on how/what we should circulate on our new Readers, we'd love to hear them.

It'd be fairly easy to put together a collection of well-formatted public-domain and creative commons works and include those on the Readers, and let people know they can keep a copy of those works on their computers even after they return the Readers.

If the Readers aren't the pocket editions, you can have memory cards loaded with freely distributable ebooks; otherwise, you have to consider the amount of space available--but a hundred ebooks don't take up that much storage space.