Awhile back Fox News Chicago’s Anna Davlantes got excoriated for suggesting that libraries might be a waste of money in a digital age. It was a dopey report, but it did sort of inadvertently raise a decent question: how will libraries adapt to the increasing digitization of content? It opens up a lot of great possibilities, but the fact that digital concept is as much a new concept as a new technology also makes it tricky.
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The CPL, in my opinion, does a nice job with digital content: they’ve got a good collection of audio books, and they lend digital books in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF forms. The selection is miniscule—it sends me back to my days of going to the county library, not without nostalgia—but I don’t really blame them. Today Jessamyn West, proprietor of librarian.net and “rural librarian geek” points me to a comment she left at Wired which I think explains a lot, and should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the wild world of DRM:
