eBook lending: Libraries Go Digital
(CNN) -- Board a bus or a train today and chances are you'll see several people with eReaders in hand. While most probably bought their electronic books on a popular website, you may find a few who borrowed the paperless books from the library.
EBooks accounted for 6.4% of all publishing in 2010, according to the American Association of Publishers, and 114 million electronic books were sold last year.
While the majority of eBooks sold today are bought by individual readers, a growing number of the paperless books are winding up in public library catalogs.
"Our popular e-content collection at ebooks.nypl.org currently has over 75,000 copies across more than 35,000 titles," said Christopher Platt, director of Collections and Circulation Operations at The New York Public Libraries. He oversees the intake of more than a million new items every year.
While that sounds like a lot of eBooks, it's a tiny fraction of the system's overall number of books available for lending. "We have over 6 million items across our 90 locations in the physical circulation collections," Platt said.
Read the complete article here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/26/living/digital-libraries/index.html
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