The latest trend that has taken its turn in the field of digitized education is the starting of new learning methods including the education through eBooks. The latest thing implemented is the borrowing or lending of eBooks from the e-library. But according to a new study it has been said that E-book reading has been quite slow these days as it has proved to be really slow than the manual method of borrowing and reading books from the libraries.
When asked in detail few of the problems came out in light. Users complain that the limited supply or say choices available in the case of books has been a real pain in the ass, resulting in the frustration of their kind. Another reported trouble is the uncertainty in knowing whether their local branch offers E-releases or not.
This new survey was released by the Pew research center centered mostly on the Present status of E-book lending/ Borrowing. The report says that around 12% of E-book users of the teenage group or older downloaded a text from the library over the past year, whereas around 20% of the adults read an E-book recently.
Major book companies and publishers have made this very clear in their statements that they are gonna make the books available in the form of e-books in a very limited way and some have even refused to do so. The companies feel like they are gonna loose the profit and value merchandise if they start letting other people read their books online. Some big names are Simon and schuster, the hachette book group etc and when you honestly ask me about it i feel its more because of the lack of proper awareness.
The survey conducted was actually done on about 3000 respondents in the period of almost a month , suggesting the fact that there patrons who are in charge of the libraries are also not comfortable with the E-book processing as they are unable to provide the users what they need. Same thing goes with the users as they complain that they can’t get a particular title on their devices just because the device is unable to receive any digital text from outside.
The users replied or better yet advised that they would surely be more interested in this project if they would be provided with a device with the E-book they are looking for already downloaded in it. This seems to be a better alternative for them rather than sharing just the digital content! Now this changes everything as this whole program is now turned into a E-book device lending thing. Over half of the Patrons say that most of the time it turns out that that the book they were looking for was not with them from the very start.
The American library association has been arranging meetings with publishers quite frequently nowadays since they also understand the gravity of this situation and they are looking for ways to satisfy both the sides. Recently the Penguin group (USA) announced a different pilot program or better say that as an oncoming experiment just to support this new initiative. The group has declared that they will make every book they publish available as E-books in the coming six months after the book is published. This program is going to be active only for the New York and Brooklyn library systems. But who knows if this one is going to be stable or not because they also declared some kind of a program last year also but it was later suspended, and we hope that it doesn’t happens this time around also.
“I applaud Penguin’s decision today to re-start e-book sales to libraries so that we may again meet our mutual goals of connecting authors and readers,” library association president Molly Raphael said in a statement.
On the bright side a new statistic that was lost in all the negativity found in this survey was this little fact that seems to strengthen our faith in this new digitization of library thing. The data is :- Those who borrow E-books from libraries tend to read 29 more books per year than their average usage data showed. This is still greater than those who don’t read e-books by 23 books. And the experts thing that this is good even for the book groups because ultimately the users who don’t have a library card are gonna get more comfortable buying an e-book rather than first getting a library card and then borrowing the book.
Take a look at the bigger picture here if you have trouble understanding the usefulness of this new initiative. Around half of those who were surveyed said that they bought their most recent books and only 15 percent said that they borrowed an E-book from a library!
So what do you choose? Thick and heavy books, long lines of borrowers or just a digital copy of your book on your pda or laptop or your smartphone!
