Eeee-Books. A Librarian's Guide To Publishers.

The landscape of e-publishing and e-formats is ever-shifting, like the earth that used to rumble underneath my people in the early time. Some times the earth would begin to quake, and then it would open up and swallow one of my many husbands.

E-books are kind of like that. There is no steady plain, no solid ground that might not turn to quicksand overnight. For this reason, they make me a little misty-eyed for my home land.

But I'm also very confused, which is why I was glad to see this Guide to Publishers in the Library E-book Market, published on the Digital Shift site. I will keep it as a reference, until the publishing ground shifts again.

 The guide differentiates between publishers catering to public libraries and those with more of an academic focus, which is good because a lot of the information I find on E-books is for public library collections, but I manage a small library for a health professional school.

Because our library is small, and the curriculum of our school has a specialized focus, we don't want some big wooly mammoth package, offering a lot of books we don't need. We want to be able to pick and choose the titles that are just right for us, like specific anatomy atlases and textbooks on physiology and pathology.

But I have yet to find a publisher or vendor who can match what we need on our terms. When I have looked through some of the book lists from companies providing health science content, I did not see anything that would be useful to a large number of our users. What I saw instead were titles like: "What you need to know about colon polyps."

Where I come from, we did not have colon polyps. The gravel we ingested with our food made sure of that. We did not have strange writings in the clouds. We had cave drawings. More direct, if you ask me. But what do I know? I'm just a cavewoman.

There are many, many mysteries surrounding Eeee-books, and each provider of e-books offers different lending/purchasing models, keeping the mystery alive. I ask, can we lend the e-books to everyone, or just one person at a time? Will they work on any device? What kind of pricing models are available? Would it even make sense to get e-books for our library? Or are we jumping on a wagon of bands? Do users want them?

So many questions. I will continue to hunt for answers, like I used to hunt the mighty Trachodon, and I will post the information I find here. But right now, my prominent, over-sized forehead hurts.