Tuesday, January 29, 2008
To kindle or not to kindle in your library?
I had a chance to fondle -- um, I mean, try out -- a Kindle when I was at the HRLC offices yesterday-- Joanne bought one for the region so we can all try it out. She'll bring it to our next HRLC Open House in July so other people will get a chance to check it out.
I liked the Kindle quite a bit. But it still has a ways to go to be useful for me. It doesn't have a backlight, for example. (It seems a bit backwards to have to use a booklight clamped to the top of it, if you want to read in bed. And really, who doesn't want to read in bed?) And it is not as easy to use it to surf the Web (or do email) as I would like.
I was hoping for a higher-functioning version of the BlackBerry or PalmPilot (with a larger screen), which would allow me to keep track of my calendar, surf the web, take notes on things AND read books. But the Kindle is very minimalistic. Still, it's quite nice and if it wasn't so expensive I'd probably get one just to spare myself the mental anguish of picking which 15 books I take with me whenever I go on a trip (and the physical suffering of dragging them all in my backpack "just in case").
Do I think Kindles portend the demise of public libraries? Not on your life, buckaroo. At least, not if libraries are willing to keep changing with the times, to become more of a community space and to provide what people want, as well as what they need. Like Borchert said (in the previous post), "Some see libraries as fragile. But the library of 20 years ago was nothing like the library of today, and will be nothing like the library of 5 years from now. They're changing, and we just don't know what they're becoming."
If you're thinking about checking out Kindles in your library (like the Sparta Public Library does), check out this interesting post about Kindles in the library on the blog Tinfoil & Racoon: Looking for the new and shiny in libraryland and beyond: http://rochellejustrochelle.typepad.com/copilot/2008/01/loaning-kindle.html
Signing off,
Mary (who will now go crawl into bed with a good old-fashioned paperback)
¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 10:28 PM
