Marred by Shelving
From Tom Peters, thoughts on the increasingly-frequent question of whether and how libraries can lend out ebooks. "We need a radical new way to circulate etexts," Peters writes, emphasizing that ebooks are simply not the same animal as their printed counterparts.
He concludes with the interesting point, "perhaps for all these centuries lending libraries have been good information services marred by shelving – by the need to process, handle, label, shelve, re-handle, and preserve all those pulpy, plastic, scratchable, breakable, eminently decayable text-bearing devices. If libraries got out of the device business, we could concentrate on content and services."
