The nation’s first all-digital, book-free public library system has opened in San Antonio, with patrons lining up to peruse on online catalog on Apple touch screen computers and check out books on e-readers.
Library mavens from across the U.S. and from as far away as Hong Kong came to view the library this week, according to an Associated Press report.
"I told our people that you need to take a look at this. This is the future," Mary Graham, vice president of South Carolina's Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce told the AP. "If you're going to be building new library facilities, this is what you need to be doing."
The Bexar County Digital Library, also known as BiblioTech, is located in south San Antonio and is the only public library operated by the county government. (The city of San Antonio, located within Bexar County, operates its own system). It was built with $1.9 million in county tax money and $500,000 in private donations. Time magazine said it “looks like an orange-hued Apple store and is stocked with 10,000 e-books, 500 e-readers, 48 computers, and 20 iPads and laptops.”
The AP repeated the Apple theme, writing: “Even the librarians imitate Apple's dress code, wearing matching shirts and that standard-bearer of geek-chic, the hoodie.”
As Time reported in September, this isn’t the first time a public library has opened without printed books. In 2002, the Tucson-Pima Public Library system in Arizona opened a book-free branch, providing Web-based services and job training. But after just a few years, the library phased in printed materials. Its patrons demanded them.
As one Tucson librarian told the writer Carrie Russell on her blog recently: “It was the community – the people who lived in the surrounding neighborhoods – that requested that print books be added to the library. They expected books, and they wanted books. Today, the Santa Rosa Branch Library provides everything you would want to see in your library."


http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy ... 8801.story

Our local library has an e-book checkout option, but the selection of e-books is utter crap. It's about on-par with the free stuff Google and Amazon offer. Public domain and that sort of stuff.

Three reasons for that sort of thing:

1. Established libraries looking to build e-book collections can't just suddenly stop ordering print materials. They have to add a new budget for e-books--and they may not have much money available.

2. Some authors and publishers won't allow e-book versions of their materials to be released to libraries at all, or embargo them from libraries for some months.

3. E-books often cost libraries several times what they cost consumers. The latest James Patterson book might cost us over four times what the same book in print format would cost us wholesale. So we can't afford a lot of the latest stuff.

We're actually luckier than many libraries (especially small ones like ours) in that we have been able to spend a considerable part of our budget on e-books. But it takes time to build a collection from scratch. It'll be years before we have a truly substantial e-book collection.

Another thing to bear in mind is that OverDrive, the circulating e-book service that has made deals with the publishers of most of the popular best-selling authors, costs thousands of dollars a year get into your library before you have bought a single title. That overhead alone amounts to about 15% of what we were already spending on print materials--and again, we can't just stop buying print materials for our existing patron base. We waited an additional year or two before getting OverDrive for the price to fall down that low. Larger libraries have more resources, but OverDrive also charges them more. Really little libraries couldn't possibly afford the service.

A couple of my colleagues in the state have tried another service that costs a lot less but does not have any best-selling authors to speak of. We thought long and hard about possibly going with that alternative, but decided that we really needed the bestsellers. Turns out we made the right choice--the libraries using the other service can't get many of their patrons to use it.

Ours is the 3M Cloud Library.

Libraries need books on shelves.Otherwise,they might as well be internet cafes.