Week 9 #22

World eBook Fair. This is quite the collection of ebook sites! It is nice to go to one place and be able to search different collections, it would be even nicer if one search would do that instead of repeating the search in each collection; maybe someday. The sites that charge for the eBooks, like eBooks for Everything, had many newer titles which wasn't surprising and the cost for most of the things I looked up weren't bad.

Did anyone find the cost of joining World Ebook Fair for an institution? I kept getting an error message when I tried to get the to page. I would have to look at this a little more before joining because I'm not sure how many of the collections are available only through the World Ebook Fair site or if you could download the ebooks through the individual sites, like Project Gutenberg. This might be a task for one of my student library aides, to go through the list of collections and see which ones are available separately and tag them to de.licio.ous.

It seems like subscribing to an ebook collection would be a good idea, though I don't think it would get a ton of usage at the middle school level. Required reading material is pretty much provided by the school and if a student needs a copy to take home arrangements can be made if the library's copies are all checked out. The public domain stuff that is the bulk of what is available for free, that my students would read we already have or can interlibrary loan real copies. So I'm just not sure. The other thing that comes to mind is a student downloading the books then printing them out on the library printer. I don't know how much the school's paper budget could take of that.

I read through several other blogs for this class on this topic and just about everyone talked about loving the feel and smell ect. of a real book and I have to agree. When I go on wilderness trips pretty much everyone has brought along at least one book (I usually have several) and books are exchanged, a lot if the weather is bad, and I just can't see trying to swap an ebook, also weight is usually an issue for trips when we fly in and extra batteries weigh a ton. You can get solar battery rechargers but if your batteries run down it will probably be due to bad weather reading and so there probably isn't much sun! Also, one of the best part of these trips for me is getting away from all the chaos and electronics of civilization so who wants to deal with solar panels and rechargers, and looking at screens! Yuck. The real book is not extinct and I don't think it is endangered yet maybe just threatened.