SFL
The point system is a compelling incentive package. As an ILL manager much of what I do is dispute mediation between us and another library. It would be nice to avoid that!

Users will not lend without some kind of incentive. You are absolutely correct. So the question is, what can we offer them? Several ways to compensate come to mind, depending on the type of library.

As far as security goes, the ILL offices deal with lost or damaged books all the time. Local users, however, do not charge processing fees on top of replacement fees, unlike other libraries.
Of course we would encourage users to loan only items they would be comfortable receiving a replacement for–again, similar to the library model. Please don’t lend your personal special collections! The library would bill the borrower the replacement cost just like the library model.

You make a good point about shelf space also. My only answer to that would be that we need shelf space for ILL already. The increase would happen in waiting for our lenders to pick up items like you mention. Again, though, we would have shipped the item back to a lending library, why not ship back to a lending user, except in that case the lender is local and therefore the shipping is likely cheaper?

As for LT- I have found their development people very responsive to ideas and tweaks that are within their general technical parameters- I’d be happy to be part of a conversation with them about it.

First, the user offering to lend this book out (without any sort of compensation), has to trek to the library to hand it over to the ILL staff. Who wants to go to the library just to lend a book out?

Second, the users you see lending books to each other know each other and trust each other. I wouldn’t want to loan my book I bought with my hard-earned money out to some random stranger who’ll do god only knows what with it.

Think too of how much hold shelf space will be taken up with returned books waiting for their owner to pick them up.

I really don’t think it’s a good idea.

Hmmm…great idea, RJ!

That is amazing how many books were exchanged between private owners last year!

Readers have successfully created a direct delivery program that is very cost effective, efficient. Last year, Paperbackswap exchanged about as many as 1/5 of the OCLC returnable traffic. Readers Rock & Deliver!

We don’t know that the son isn’t a 12 year old who’s reading out loud in a purposefully annoying voice and bothering someone else who is only a few feet away. Mom’s can be a bit defensive.

OTOH, it could be exactly as bethsteadman conveys it.

Champion a young boy reading over absolute quiet in a library? Absolutely!

But try to let the rage fade since we don’t KNOW it was rage-worthy.

Just sayin’

I just came across your post. It is gratifying to see you respond to our design so positively and to be able to so succinctly outline most of the major goals of this creative collaborative effort. I take this as a sign of some success. FYI – there is some more information on the library on our web-site: http://www.alspectorarchitecture.com/uvsc.htm

We would also appreciate any constructive criticism about the facility as we are always seeking to understand how are buildings are used and perceived so we can continue to improve our work.

Your Shaping Libraries site is very informative and extremely thoughtful. Thanks for the great work!

Best,

Jacob Alspector, RA
Principal
Alspector Architecture, LLC
Design Architect for the UVU Library

One of the reasons why the Kindle is so appealing is the management. It is very easy to manage your collection of books online and wirelessly send them to a device. You don’t even need the device in hand to do this. Can the Sony support that?

You mention that it would be better to have licenses where libraries just offer the content to the user on their own device. I completely agree. It would be far more useful if we could send content to the user where ever they are rather than have them come get our devices. However, once again, can the Sony do that? How could a library “send” a title to a Sony Reader remotely? The only other option is to let them authenticate from their home/office and download from the web/their desktop to their device which is an ok second option.

Difficulty: this will likely cost a fortune. Essentially we would be allowing our users to have full access to content forever. We do this to a certain extent with articles and database subscriptions (the user can download the pdf once they have access to it). Now, it seems like Google’s new project is actually getting around this by not letting the user download the ebook but instead offers access only through the web–so again, can the Sony browse the web at this point? You imply that they can, so that is great.

Anyhow, I appreciate your info on the Reader. We will definitely try not to be tied down to one platform but Amazon really does make purchasing and managing the titles easy. I imagine that in the future most devices will read a variety of formats and it will not really matter what device you have so users can purchase the reader that they feel most comfortable with (at least, that is what I am hoping for).

Moreover, Sony has recently obtained support from Google, which has formatted about 500,000 of its previously scanned books into .epub format, which can be easily downloaded from the Sony e-book store.

The Sony devices offer about 250M of on-board storage, a 2GB SD slot and a 16GB Sony duo-Pro slot. This offers storage for well over 20,000 e-books. The Sony also will play .mp3 files (music or talking books).

Both the Sony and Kindle have multiple fonts, so that people with vision disabilities might be able to use the expanded font rather than depend on “big print” books.

How Many e-Books Can A Sony PRS 505 e-Book Reader Hold?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO6A4ABxkpQ&feature=channel_page

At some point in time, institutions would be better off looking at trying to negotiate site-licenses for Sony and Amazon titles, and let people buy their own Kindles. The cost of handling them is non-zero. The whole idea of a Kindle/Sony is to distribute information via the WEB all over the world. The Library/Loaner model just isn’t viable against the distributed model that e-book readers are bring to the world.

A New Generation of E-book Readers:

We never wanted to give the impression that we were the first to do this!

We certainly are not. Joyce and other librarians around the country have all been a great help in trying to work out our system.

I hope more libraries will be open about this new opportunity in the future!

You are right about the limitations to a certain platform. Much of the decision to proceed came out of the new app for the iPhone. We felt that this was a first step in the open device direction, particularly considering the popularity of the iPhone. It is my hope that eventually Amazon will adopt a similar app model for future eReader generations (of course, the other devices would need to be okay with this).

You are correct about the acquisitions aspect also. Essentially we are building a secondary library for our institution; one that takes no space and is easily managed. If we choose to go full circ and not just ILL support, we will likely need to add some indicator in our library catalog of our “new” holdings via Amazon. All this is just my personal speculation of the future. Very exciting times!

–Gerrit

…

As for your message, I’ve been trying harder to correct typos when I’m doing chat reference. My typing skills are really poor. Patrons don’t seem to mind but one can never really tell.

This is the “Librarian from University of Nebraska-Omaha”.

Just a little clarification. De-registering is very simple and a must to prevent unwanted purchases. However, we do not erase any of the purchased titles. When you check out the Kindle, you also have access to all the other titles purchased on that particular Kindle. Many of our patrons return the Kindle telling us about the other books they have enjoyed reading.

As I told Gerrit, our Kindles are continually checked out and have holds placed on them waiting for their return.