Blogroll

Author values profits over literacy

It is rather stunning. Terry Deary is a children’s author whose books were the seventh most borrowed from British libraries last year. Yet his view of libraries is that “no one has an entitlement to read a book for free, at the expense of the author, the publisher and the … tax payer.” According to […]

E-books, libraries and instant gratification

In its latest look at libraries in the digital age, the Pew Internet Project last week released a report on libraries, library users and e-books. The study confirms some of what I’ve been thinking about e-books lately and the continuing technological draw of instant gratification.

Perhaps the lead item in the study was that 58% […]

Ebook demand booms locally

How popular have e-books and ebook readers and apps become? Consider this: ebook checkouts from the Siouxland Libraries increased 201 percent over the course of 2011. Meanwhile, the number of electronic materials went up 139 percent from 2010 to 2011.

The figures are rather stunning. Last January, the first complete month of use by those […]

The need for libraries in a connected world

One of the magical and essential functions of public libraries is they provide users basically free access to information and opportunity. As much as people want to talk about the impact of e-books and the like on libraries, this has not changed. If anything, it may be growing more important, as evidenced by a recent […]

Library board is opportunity to give back

Most of the public attention surrounding last night’s City Council meeting was on the ongoing and longstanding debate over an events center. Yet item 29 of 31 on the agenda, a relatively innocuous item, was of more personal interest.

Just more than two hours into the meeting, the Council unanimously approved a resolution “advising and […]