The New Digital Library
July 1, 2014
Libraries were revolutionized when online public access catalogs did away with the old card catalog and made the entire collection available on the Internet. Libraries across the world soon got the idea to “dump” their catalogs in one big database. Worldcat.org was born and people can locate any book in any library that shares their catalog. Next came ebooks where people could download any book to a digital device for a fee and libraries caught on to with too. Enter Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services and someone got the bright idea to apply the same business model to books.
Public libraries may be lamenting, but people who don’t mind paying a low nominal fee will enjoy unlimited books a month. The newest member to the downloadable entertainment service is Scribd:
“Scribd is your personal digital library, where you have unlimited access to the world’s largest collection of e-books and written works. Our premium subscription service offers over 400,000 books from over 900 publishers, including New York Times bestsellers, literary classics, groundbreaking non-fiction, and reader favorites in every genre. We also have millions of user-uploaded written works, from landmark court filings to academic papers from scholars around the world.”
Is this a good thing? Yes. It creates more competition for Amazon and gives readers more options to access books. Does it mean libraries will go away? No, people still want things for free. This is a great move for publishers and takes advantage of new platforms. Though there is nothing that can replace a good paperback.
Whitney Grace, July 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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