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With the rising availability of ebooks, and potentially etextbooks, how do we as libraries help our patrons to access these books?  The rising costs of textbooks makes education less accessible than before to students.  Yet, having textbooks on reserve causes problems – staffing, processing, replacing, checking for damage or missing pages.  eTextbooks would be a great solution, but how many textbooks that faculty currently use are already available for libraries to add to their collections?  Will the availability rise?  Can faculty be encouraged to change the textbooks for their courses?  What is the role of the librarian in all of this?  If there is a change to etextbooks, how does this impact bringing the book to class, reading the book without the technology, and saving the book for the future or selling the book back?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 7:52 am and is filed under E-books, Education, In the News, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.