E-books find their way to Swedish libraries

[Andy Sjostrom]

<a href="http://www.folkbibliotek.lund.se/">http://www.folkbibliotek.lund.se/</a><br /><br />I heard a while back ago from one of our readers, Timmy Ljung, that some Swedish libraries are beginning to carry e-books. A typical borrowing period is seven to twenty one days, and then the e-book is no longer readable. Quite a few Swedish novels and children's books are available in <a href="http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/DownLoadReaderStep1.asp">MobiPocket</a> format. Some one hundred English books are available through <a href="http://www.netlibrary.com/">netLibrary</a>.<br /><br />Is this ever going to become a widely used way of borrowing books at the library?

[PlayAgain?]

It would be nice.

I find e-books convenient, cheap and they do their bit for the trees :D so the sooner we can get everything onto e-books, the better (though I don't like the way some on-line retailers charge a full whack for the book when the production costs are clearly less what with no need for a printing press an' all).

[Kirk Stephens]

My library has a couple of Rocket E-Book readers. If you have a library card, you are allowed to borrow them for 2 week periods. Also, you can have the librarian load up to something like 10 titles onto the device. I was pretty surprised when I heard about this. I decided to borrow one just to see what the device was like. I found it to be pretty big and bulky but it did what it was supposed to do and was built very solid.

[Chris Forsberg]

http://www.folkbibliotek.lund.se/
Is this ever going to become a widely used way of borrowing books at the library?
I think so! Who has the time to go to the library anymore. The convenience of downloading the book and start reading instantly is unbeatable.

However, I guess I miss the MS Reader format of the books.