Ever Check Out an eBook from a Public Library?
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, a non-profit research organization in Washington, D.C., is conducting an online survey of public library patrons who borrow e-books.
If you have checked out or downloaded e-books from a public library, please consider taking Pew Internet’s survey, available at the link below. All responses will be confidential, although your answers may be quoted anonymously in a future report. The survey should take about 15 minutes.
To take the survey, visit: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/participate/survey/e-book-borrowers
The Pew Internet Project will also be doing broader surveys of public library patrons general, as well as people (including non-library-users) who own e-readers or tablet computers. If you want to participate in those, you can sign up to be notified of future surveys here.
To learn more about the Pew Internet Project’s research on e-reading and public libraries, which is entirely free and available to the public, visit libraries.pewinternet.org.
Lucy Bennett
12:00 am on Thursday, April 19, 2012
I haven't used the library eBooks, but I do like the digital audiobooks.
Robert Gasparro
12:28 pm on Wednesday, April 25, 2012
There have been recent articles in the New York Times concerning the Tug of War between publishers and public libraries. A link to one of the articles is at the end of this comment.
I frequently check out books in the Montgomery County or Philadelphia system and the e-books are great. I can read the book on my Kindle or on my computer or on the cloud, depending where I place it.
The fear of the publishers that it will hurt their revenue seems to be misplaced. I recently purchased a Kindle edition of a book I borrowed from Luddington Library, and a few months ago I purchased a hard copy of a book I had earlier borrowed from the Penn Wynne branch. I filled out the survey.
Bob Gasparro
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/business/for-libraries-and-publishers-an-e-book-tug-of-war.html