The Wild West of eBooks

Believe it or not, but you can now download eBooks for free from Suffolk County’s Live-brary, available online through HHH Community Library’s website.

That’s right. That place you thought was so old-fashioned and behind the times? They are now transitioning from books to digital media.

Ellen Druda, in charge of Internet services at the library, said, “We will never, never never stop buying print books, but we want to bring our readers what they want. We want to encourage people to read and they like these gadgets.”

As a matter of fact, when they started carrying eBooks, at the end of 2008, there was very little interest in them, Druda said.

“People didn’t really know about them yet. In 2009, people started getting interested, but you could mainly only buy the Kindle and Kindle doesn’t work with our library system.”

The library had under 200 eBook checkouts in 2009, Druda estimates.

But in 2010? “We had almost 2000 eBook checkouts. People started seeing all the advertising for the Nook and the realized what a great gift it would be. That’s when there was a dramatic increase in interest. I would say that in the last few months, easily 80% of the questions we get at the library have to do with eBooks. ‘What should I buy? How does it work? What titles are available?’”

You can download eBooks onto Barnes and Noble’s Nook, onto the Sony eBook Reader, onto your PC, your iPhone, iPad, iPad Touch or Android. Why not Amazon’s Kindle?

“Amazon wants you to purchase eBooks through them, and not get them free from your library,” Druda said. “We’re not happy about it and we’re trying to negotiate with them but they want to sell Kindles and Kindle eBooks. They don’t feel the need to share. It’s not nice. People are disappointed.”

Now why do you need one of these eReaders anyway? What’s wrong with a plain old-fashioned book?

Well, here’s one example: You commute by train into Manhattan every morning. You are already traveling with too much stuff, so you don’t want to add a possibly heavy book to the mix, but would love to be able to read one on the train, help make the time go by faster. 

So you buy a Nook online, and now, all of a sudden, just by adding less than a pound to your cargo, you’ve got a gadget that’s half an inch thick and can hold a minimum of 1,500 books (2GB, expandable to 16GB).

Or how about this? Maybe you’re flying out to visit family in Florida this weekend and you’ve almost finished the hardcover book you’re reading. The little bit that’s left to read is not enough to tide you over for the round-trip plane ride, so now you have to bring two books in your carry-on bag. But if you had an eBook reader, you could have many books at your fingertips, more than you could possibly read on one trip. 

“This digital book industry is still very new, still in its infancy,” Druda said. “It’s the Wild West out there. Everyone’s looking at each other, trying to make it work. The authors, publishers, distributors—they are all watching the price points, watching Amazon…The eBook industry is still on shaky ground. The industry is still growing, and we will grow right along with it. It’s very exciting to be a librarian at this time.” 

If you have an eReader and aren’t sure how it works or how to download eBooks from the Live-brary site, you can come into the or call with any questions. You can even make an appointment to have someone go over everything with you one on one. 

It’s definitely not your father’s library anymore.