Digitisation & eBooks

Interview

I interviewed my sister on her thoughts on eBooks and digitisation as she is fifteen years old and currently in Year Ten. She is an avid reader so her opinions on the issue would be developed and relevant. She goes to a private school and works part-time at a supermarket. Therefore she is a fairly typical teenager.

I first asked about her attitudes to eBooks when reading for pleasure, and whilst she does not like eBooks because they have no texture or new book smell, she will read them if she has difficulty obtaining the book in hardcopy. She said that her friends were much the same and that nothing beats a real book.

My second question was in relation to books that were required reading for school, such as Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare, 1597). She replied that it was often handy to have an electronic copy as back if the text was left at school and was in favour of organisations such as Project Gutenberg that make electronic copies of public domain books.

She got much more enthusiastic when I asked about electronic versions of her textbooks and she is definitely very much in favour of them. She complains bitterly of the weight of her textbooks and would much rather an eBook version of all of them to be included so that the book could be left at school yet still is able to do her homework. Currently, only some of the books come with an electronic version, such as her mathematics textbook. She is particularly worried about her VCE books for next year and university books, as she has seen some tertiary texts and was very unimpressed by the size of the law and anatomy textbooks that did not come with electronic versions. I reassured her that more and more textbooks were coming with electronic versions each year and that by the time she is there, maybe they all will.

Her views on digitisation were less pronounced, as though she could see how projects to back up archives of newspapers, journals and books could be useful for university, it does not really affect her at this stage of life and to ask again when she is at university. Project Gutenberg being excepted because it carries books she might actually have a use for.

Overall, her views are fairly similar to mine, though mine are much more favourable to eBooks for leisure, whilst still preferring a real book I do not mind reading eBooks either. It is important as librarians to keep up with technology and provide access to as many trends as can be afforded so that libraries do not get left behind, even though books will continue to have a place in libraries for a long time to come.