E-Books and E-Content

Falkirk wheel again (courtesy of Kathy)

I was disappointed to miss the e-books and e-content event last month due to illness, so I'm pleased to see all the presentations are now available. Over the last couple of years I have been using some of my NTF fund to buy a range of different e-book readers. In my little collection I have: a bebook, a cybook, a sony touch, sony pocket and sony prs505, an iriver story, a kindle, an archos and an ipad. So far not one of them is an outright winner for me in terms of academic library use (well, maybe the ipad...). I feel the Sonys should be, as at least it's possible to add non DRM controlled EPUB documents onto them, so a few subscribed titles maybe. Certainly they seem to be the best bet for using with public library ebooks. I do like the Newcastle City Library pages, and the Overdrive summary page of different devices. Sony's are not so easy to read PDFs on though. We loan a few sony readers out to our users and they are very popular, but it's frustrating that they don't work with all our ebook content. I must say I like the option via Amazon to email a PDF to your kindle and have it reformatted - that's much better for EJ articles, but really only works for a personal reader, not loanable equipment. I know other folks are experimenting a lot with readers now - I'll be interested to know your experience if you'd like to leave me a comment.