I got this email from a staff member today. It may have made my Monday. It isn't about being a digital-only evangelist, it's about helping people (patrons AND staff) see things differently than before. It's about print, about digital. About audio. About Fiction. About Non-fiction. About librarians. About. Everything.
That's why I come to work.
That's why I come to work.
"Cool! Thanks for sharing.
And, btw, I think we’ve had a
discussion or two about how much I hate e-books, got to have my hardcover
books. Well…
My husband got me a Kindle for
Christmas and I thought, oh shoot, this is going to be wasted money. But
I’ve got to at least give it a good-faith effort. So I picked a book—The
Game by Tom (Hinshel) Wood, who is one of my favorite authors—and gave it a
go. Tough sledding at first, but about halfway through I was sold. So much easier reading in bed at night; also easier reading when I go out to
eat, takes up so much less space.
There are only a couple of
drawbacks I’ve found so far. I have this spatial positioning thing going
on in my head, so that if I’m reading along and come to a character I can’t
remember, I would have a memory in my mind of where it was on the page, so I
could flip back through the pages fairly easily to find where that character
was introduced and refresh my memory. That’s going to be a lot tougher
with the Kindle, but once I get the hang of the Search button, it’ll probably
be fine. The other thing is that I’m having trouble finding e-books to
check out. Part of it is that I can’t seem to get the hang of how to do
the searches, but probably also that not everything is available as an e-book.
Even stranger than my reluctant
conversion to e-books is that I was cleaning up some bookshelves and came
across some of my stuff from when I was going through the MLS program. And one
of the papers I’d done for a library automation class had this gem in it: “I view the advent of ebooks as the most important trend in library automation,
believing that they have the potential to totally revise the face of libraries
as we know them.” Now, mind you, this is a paper I wrote back in 2002, so
it’s only taken me 12 years to come around.
Like I said, I think you and I
have had a discussion or two wherein I dug in my heels and gave one of those
“pry my hardcovers out of my cold, dead hands” speeches and although you must
have been laughing on the inside, knowing that I’d come around eventually, you listened
very sympathetically.
And now here we are. You
were right all along, of course. And apparently our e-book collection is
attracting attention from distant lands—like California. I got an email
query sent to the circmanager last week from a woman in California wanting to
know if she could get a non-resident card and, if so, would she then be able to
check out e-books.
Just wanted to let you know that
I’m starting to come around, dipping at least a toe into the 21st
century. But it’s people like you who aren’t afraid to forge ahead who
really make all of this possible.
Not to mention the entertaining
emails you send out!
Thanks!"
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