Brewster's Millions: ALA Preview 2011

"At the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego, a standing-room-only panel focused on how e-books will affect the future of libraries. From research and pilot programs to digitizing efforts, libraries have long helped prepare the way for e-books. But now that the consumer market for e-books has taken off, are libraries in danger of being marginalized? On the panel was Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive as well as the Open Library project, a digitizing program for library e-books that now includes more than 150 libraries and two million, mostly public domain, digitized books available for online lending. Kahle urged librarians not to give up their traditional roles, and not to let the promise of vendor-managed, licensed access turn libraries into agents for a few major corporations. "What libraries do is buy stuff and lend it out," he says, suggesting that libraries "digitize what we have to, and buy what we can." PW caught up with Kahle to talk about e-books, sure to be a hot topic at the ALA Annual Conference...."