It’s Library Lovers’ Day. With ebook readers now taking off, what will this mean for the personal library? Many readers love their print collections and agonise over weeding them come time for moving house, or running out of storage space. With ebook purchases we are not ‘buying’ a book in the same sense of ‘sale’ of a print book, but we don’t have the same space concerns. How might this affect curation of personal collections? I think about the volunteers who catalogue dead people’s libraries on LibraryThing – will our public figures in the future have digital libraries that will inspire such cataloguing. Enough questions. What got me posing all these was reading a couple of articles on the difference between ebook and book procurement.

You can’t have a discussion of any length about ebook sales and pricing and DRM in any sized group of digital publishing observers before you hear that it is somehow wrong or unfair that a “purchaser” can’t do everything with an ebook they’ve bought that they do with a print book they’ve bought. — From where I sit, you can’t actually “sell” an ebook  by Mike Shatzkin

“People want to build digital libraries and own those files forever — they don’t want to re-buy them in some other format for some new e-reader / tablet / smartphone / laptop device 5 years from now, and they don’t want to somehow lose access to them. So, call it a license, call it a sale, call it whatever you want, so long as I can download the file to my computer and back it up and keep reading it even if Amazon disappeared from the face of the Earth or wanted to stop all Kindle operations tomorrow.” — Are E-Books Sold or Licensed? by David Derrico

A bouquet and some books for Library Lovers’ day…

Image by vanberto, CC licence. Some rights reserved