Ebooks: A K-12 Overview  

One of the things I like best about being a librarian is being surrounded by folks – teachers, other librarians, technologists and students – who are in the business of making themselves better. Better learners, better users, better facilitators, better readers, better people.

The behavioral tendencies of these types rub off on those they come in contact with and last year I decided that eBooks were an area I needed to understand better.

Three years ago my campus librarian and I went to ALA with a mission: We intended to get our heads around the eBook market once and for all. After making lists of questions we hit the exhibit floor where we interrogated hapless vendors, make copious notes, poured over them, strategized, wrote more questions and went back in to interrogate again. It was exhausting, but satisfying and we learned a great deal.

As a result, I cavalierly thought re-familiarizing myself with the eBook market last summer would be a breeze. I quickly learned there is no “once and for all” in the eBook world.

The information here is a summary of my research which has been ongoing since last summer. Not surprisingly, the eBook landscape has not cooperated and become any less dynamic. The information found on the Publishers and Aggregators tabs might best be considered snapshots while that on the Vocabulary, Twenty Questions, and Collection Strategy tabs might enable further research.

In the meantime, I hope what you find will serve as my contribution – my way of paying better forward.

Happy eReading, Lauri

The path of an eBook's content -- from author's to reader's brain -- looks familiar, but things like digital rights management (DRM) and licensing agreements make what was straightforward in a print world much more complicated in the virtual one. Still, here's the basic path:

Rutgers University's Dr. Grace Agnew provides a nice introduction to Digital Rights Management.

Agnew, Grace, Dr.,  Restrictions of Digital Rights Management. Office of Instructional and Research Technology. YouTube. Rutgers University, 3 Sept. 2009.  Web. 19 Feb. 2012. <http://youtu.be/aRfX2gPwXMo>.

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