eBooks
Congratulations
to our drawing winner, Mr. Nguyen! J
The recent survey distributed to the community brought back very interesting results. 157 students, teachers, and staff members responded. The majority of respondents (70%) read ebooks, but about a third of those preferred print. For reading devices, iPad was the big favorite followed by Kindle and Mac computers. Only 42 respondents checked out resources for personal interest this year (as opposed to checking out for school use). A surprising number expressed interest in audiobooks (37%) and 26% already listen to them. Again, iPads and iPods were the device favorites for audiobooks. The majority of respondents didn’t think Sage Hill was quite ready for ebooks in the classroom by a narrow margin, but on a scale of 1-5 with 5 being “I think we’re ready for them now” just over half chose a 4 or a 5.
With so very few of our patrons
utilizing the library for personal use, it’s unlikely the library will pursue a
personal reading ebook collection in the next year unless the classroom
environment fully embraces them as well. At present the price is too high to
justify catering to such a small number of users (personal interest patrons who
read exclusively in e-form). However, the library will definitely investigate
audiobook options and, perhaps, cheaper ebook services.
The library hosted the spring meeting of the Independent School Library Exchange (ISLE), a group of independent school librarians facing the same dilemmas with e-books. To that end the meeting hosted ten e-book vendors to provide more perspective and hopes for a better cost-to-value ratio. The little mini-conference was very successful and offered more options and opportunities to follow the progress of the educational ebook market.
If you’re interested in this topic, I would be happy to discuss it with you and obtain even more input.
More Handy Stuff From
Your Library
I recently added several hundred ebook titles to the library collection (http://library.sagehillschool.org) thanks to Project Gutenberg. These titles are out of copyright, and there are links from our library site to theirs, which offers free ebooks in many formats. Click “Catalog” and enter “Gutenberg” as a keyword to see a listing of these titles, which includes many classics.
For more free ebooks, you can check
out Amazon’s Free Library for your kindle or kindle reader on iPad here: http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2245146011
and visit http://archive.org/details/texts
for even more obscure out-of-print collections. (Check out, in particular, the
facsimile of the original author-illustrated, hand-written edition of Alice’s
Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll: http://ia700305.us.archive.org/7/items/alicesadventures19002gut/19002-h/alice_1.htm.)
Library Use
Historically library circulation declines in the last two months of the school year, as other programs, including arts and service learning, put on final shows, performances, and visits. Circulation is at its lowest during testing times (December and May), when no new material is introduced, which is as it should be. There were still 238 physical resources that left the library in the month of March, and electronic resources nearly met February with 1268 articles accessed. Visit www.sagehillschool.org/library to see more of this year’s statistics, both physical and electronic, as they become available. We’ve also added many new titles, including local flora and fauna guides suggested by the science department, to our collection.
End of Year
Please
encourage your students to return their books to the library by May 21. We are
starting inventory soon and we want as many of our resources as possible to be
available for next year’s students. I’m also taking volunteers the next few
weeks if you find the idea of scanning every book in our collection irresistible.
