“A future of empty shelves will probably never happen, but it is a fact that books are not as central as they once were to public libraries in the New River Valley. Videos, DVDs, audiobooks, CDs and other media are competing in popularity with words on paper, in books or magazines.” – Libraries without books? in the Roanoke (VA) Times, via LISNews.
The TeleRead take: Hey, it’s the words that count. E-books can vastly increase the number of books available to budget-strapped libraries. Just wait until E Ink-style technology–especially after color is possible–becomes the norm. It will even be possible in time to flip the pages of e-books. But for the moment, yes, the underfunding of paper books is an outrage. Just a fraction of all books are in electronic form, so we’re really taking about evolution, not revolution.
