Monday, October 31, 2011

Why e-books are neat

Elizabeth Henry, E-Resources/Instruction & Reference Librarian

The nice thing about e-books is that you can access them anytime, anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection and a laptop, computer, or iPad. For example, suppose you’re frantically trying to complete an assignment at 3:00 AM that’s due at 9:00 AM and you realize you need just one more source, but alas, the Library’s closed. That’s when the Library’s e-books can come in handy—they’re online, ready to be discovered and used by you for your assignment!

If you’re wondering how many e-books the Library has, my honest answer is: I don’t know. Why? Because there are so many e-books that I lost count and gave up trying to keep track of it. The reason for the incredibly huge amount of e-books is because we both subscribe to, and purchase from four – yes, four – different companies. Each company provides a place online, known as platforms, for us to read the e-books. The platform and how you can interact with the e-book will vary, but they all are essentially the same: books in electronic format and available online via the Library’s catalog. Our e-book platforms are:
They all will have different appearances and features, but there are some common features that all e-book platforms have, which are:
  • A table of contents (TOC) that you can click on to jump from one chapter to the next
  • The ability to search within the e-book for specific words
  • Being able to zoom in or out of the page so you can read the text easily
  • The option to print a limited number of pages.
  • Searchability within the full text of an e-book.
Two of the features I mentioned, the table of contents, and the ability to search within the book for specific words, can be handy by helping you save time on looking through a book to determine if it has information you need or not. For example, I want to find more information about John F. Kennedy, and I find a e-book titled Presidential Party Building : Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, which looks promising but does it have information specifically about John F. Kennedy? By clicking on the link for the e-book and opening it up, I look at the table of contents, and -voila- there’s John F. Kennedy. But wait, what if John F. Kennedy is mentioned more than once outside of the chapter? Then I type into the search box, “John F. Kennedy,” and a list appears, indicating where I can find further information about John F. Kennedy. Nifty, huh?

So you must be thinking, Perfect! Now all I have to do is find the book I want, and then download it onto my Kindle or iPad! Right? Well, I honestly wish I could say, “Yup! Go ahead and download it!” but unfortunately, no, the majority of the e-books we have (as in about 98%) are offered through platforms that aren’t able to make the e-books downloadable. The only exception is EBL, a platform we’re working on getting up and running right now.

However, in some hot-off-the-presses news, we just learned that Ebrary will allow us to be able to download e-books onto Kindles, Nooks, and iPads! So once we figure out how to do that, we’ll have the download option up and running. Stay tuned for updates.

If you have any further questions about e-books here at the Library, please do not hesitate to contact me via e-mail.

Happy reading!

1 comment:

  1. Great post. I just located your blog and wished to let you know that I have certainly loved reading your blogs. At any rate I’m going to be subscribing to your feed and I really hope you are writing again soon.

    ReplyDelete

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