A Canadian Press review looks at some of the e-book services public libraries provide at libraries in Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
"Unfortunately the message that people get when they buy those ebook readers is about where to buy ebooks, but a lot of them don't realize there's a lot of free ebooks available," said Anne O'Shea, assistant manager for electronic resources with the Vancouver Public Library.
With very little fanfare, libraries across the country have been offering access to ebooks for years, well before the Amazon Kindle and Sony's Readers became hot, trendy tech gadgets.
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O'Shea said librarians are reluctant to buy content from Amazon that can only be viewed on Kindles. The various players in the ebook industry need to work together to solve the format issue because if they don't, users will simply turn to the easiest solution, which may be online piracy, she said.
"What I'd really like to see from all of those vendors is for them to do their digital rights management in a way that isn't such a barrier for patrons, because patrons know they can download some of this stuff for free online illegally and if you put too much of a barrier in place they're not going to want to do it through the library."
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