The future of reading

In versions of the 2012 Horizon Report, eBooks were considered by many of the expert panel to be on the 1 year horizon for full adoption into education. It seems they may be right. We may soon be loaning books digitally, following a UK government review into the e-lending capabilities of public libraries. The Sieghart Review recommends that digital versions of books should be loaned to users without charge, and also that loaners should be able to borrow their books using online ordering facilities.

According to The Bookseller (online review of the book publishing industry), some pilot schemes are already on their way in UK libraries, and will be in place by summer. These schemes will be used to ascertain the level of demand from the public, before any large scale implementation is put into place. Are the British general public ready for such an advance in public lending? Mark Taylor, who is the head of CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) believes that for e-lending to be successful, librarians and their staff need to be able to support and develop skills for the general public. Get this right, Taylor argues, and we will witness a revolution in the reading behaviour of the general public as they discover a range of materials they previously had no access to. Public libraries will become the means to reconnect an entire generation of digitally able readers into a whole new world of learning.

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The future of reading by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.