‘The sound and the fury of e-book naysayers’
The adrenaline-pumper of the week? American Libraries has just run an article titled “The Elusive E-book,” by Stephen Sottong, former associate librarian at California State University, Los Angeles, whose faculty home page appears with the headline, “Retiring on September 26, 2003.”
Dissecting the Sottong piece, an information manager named Stephen Leary writes: “People won’t read entire books on these readers, Sottong assures us, yet that’s exactly what I have done myself. I’ve read dozens of books on my Sony reader, and on my desktop computer as well. Somehow I didn’t make it into Sottong’s academic research. Like other book lovers, I read many at one time. A reader is a great leap forward for many like me who don’t want to carry around a load of print books.” Exactly.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if librarians recognized the full potential of E and started worrying in a major way about e-book standards and the need to back off from an excessive reliance on DRM? Public libraries urgently need to consider new access and business models. Articles like Sottong’s, alas, steal time away from more useful efforts, including those by Isabelle Fetherston to educate the library world about the benefits of e-books for the elderly.
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May 4th, 2008 at 4:33 am
The first thing which comes to mind on this sort of thing is that the author is perhaps completely ignorant of the real online push for ebooks. He hasn’t really done his research and noticed that many of the ‘younger’ generation are so well adapted to digital technology that the possibilities held in eink and ebooks is terrific.
It seems to me just another example of the older generation having difficulty trying to keep up in the digital age - something which ebooks has really been hurt by in my mind.
May 4th, 2008 at 7:25 am
These new-fangled motorcars are noisy, dirty, and foul-smelling contraptions, not to mention that they frighten the livestock. It certainly goes without saying that people will never take to them as a viable alternative to the time-tested horse and buggy.