Is ‘shhh! silence’ the future for libraries?

Book lovers adamantly claim that e-books cannot replace printed books. Maybe it’s a romantic notion, yet a printed book has the kind of texture, smell and feel that an e-book doesn’t.

The advantages for both readers and libraries are many

However, could this preference be slowly changing among book lovers with the proliferation and strong sales of e-books?

Although e-book technology is still in its developmental phase, Amazon announced that in the last three months of 2010, e-book sales had already surpassed sales of paperback books for the first time in the US.

Amazon is now even offering a lending facility to Amazon Prime subscribers who can read more than 5,000 e-books on their Kindle for free through a new service called Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. By subscribing against payment to an Amazon Prime membership, users can borrow one book a month and read it on a Kindle e-reader, with no specific due date.

There are several other e-readers on the market such as Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Kobo e-reader Touch edition and Sony Reader Pocket edition PRS-350. There are also apps available for tablets that run on Android, Apple iPads and smart phones, through which e-books can be downloaded.

Sony Reader and Nook now also provide the facility to borrow library e-books from public libraries that have e-books in ePub format. Kindle is also offering this facility.

E-books are not yet available in public libraries in Malta. Joseph Debattista, officer in charge of the Central Public Library in Malta, says all local libraries have been computerised.

This means clients can access information through the library website using their library card number to search and renew borrowed books online.

Although Debattista believes e-book technology is the way forward, he says e-books will complement printed books but they will not substitute them.

He shows me statistics to prove this – an increase of 23,000 books have been borrowed up to the end of October this year when compared with the end of December last year. This increase includes borrowing from the public library, regional libraries and branches.

Debattista also says that over the past three years, €100,000 per year has been allocated to local libraries.

This money has been used to buy new publications, which in turn have attrac­ted more readers.

Debattista adds that since the National Library is now being digitised, manuscripts which are out of copyright, including the archives of the Knights of St John, old newspapers and paragraphs and chapters of certain books can now be read online. The logical next step would be to offer an e-book service.

Thousands of libraries abroad, especially in the US, have seen an immediate significant impact since e-book lending was introduced. At the Seattle public library system, e-book borrowing rose by 32 per cent in the month after Kindle books became available.

Europe has lagged behind the US in widespread adoption of e-books. However libraries across Europe have also started to lend e-books. In the UK, for example, a third of libraries now offer an e-book lending service.

The advantages for both readers and libraries are many – it’s a 24/7 service, librarians do not have to physically look after books, readers can choose the size of the font they want, and a borrowed e-book is automatically deleted from an e-reader once the loan period is over.

Most UK libraries offering e-books use the US supplier Overdrive. Using the Overdrive system, library users can access a website remotely from their home computer, or from e-reading devices while on the move. They download e-books by using their library card and a PIN.

Publishers, on the other hand, are expressing concern and debating a digital future where a single e-book licence may never expire, never wear out, and never need replacement. They have therefore incurred some restrictions such as the number of times a book can be lent before its licence expires.

A few years ago I too would never have dreamt of substituting a printed book for an e-book. That was until I downloaded the first e-book and started reading it.

E-books might not have the warmth and texture of printed books, but they are clean and user-friendly – each word is sharply visible and it is a pleasure to swipe across the screen or click to see each page flip as the next one is made visible.

Moreover, an e-reader will always bookmark the last page read.

My wall to wall library quickly shrank into an e-reader as hundreds of digital books could be stored in one device.

Once you get used to an e-reader, there is no turning back.

The texture, the smell and the feel of printed books is soon forgotten.

E-readers have been selling like the proverbial cheesecakes all across the globe – the more e-readers or devices that can take e-reader applications are bought, the more e-books will be downloaded.

The need to borrow e-books and not always buy them is inevitable. Therefore, public libraries will have no alternative but to lend e-books.

Public libraries are not resisting this change – rather, they are embracing it as they too adapt to technology. We still do not know what the public libraries of the future will look like.

What is sure is that in years to come, libraries will evolve just as printed books are evolving into e-books.