A Judge in the county, Nelson Wolff, is pushing for the construction of an entirely bookless public library. He says it will be called BiblioTech, which is a play on biblioteca, the Spanish word for library.

While some public libraries across the country offer ebooks to their readers, none operate as completely paperless. Wolff wants to change that. He reportedly got the idea after reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs.

The BiblioTech will resemble an Apple store, says Wolff. Readers will be able to go in and read ebooks on site or take them home either on their own device or on rentable ereaders.

“We wanted to find a low-cost, effective way to bring reading and learning to the county and also focus on the change in the world of technology,” Wolff said. “It will help people learn,” he said.

He estimates that the first 10,000 ebook titles would cost around $250,000.

To Wolff, it wouldn’t only benefit residents intellectually, but the county would benefit financially. As of right now, Bexar county doesn’t have its own public library system. They actually pay $3.7 million a year to give residents access to San Antonio’s public libraries. But that cost may nearly double, says Wolff.

The BiblioTech would be the nation’s first public library to go completely no-paper. Other places have considered it, even making proposals to begin construction – but none have been realized. There are also bookless academic libraries, but no true bookless public libraries.

[My San Antonio via Mashable]

The publisher’s eBook library includes nearly 2,000 titles, and is continuously updated. McGraw Hill says academic libraries will be interested in reference works, and public libraries will find “a wealth of titles” on careers and business skills, student and career exam study guides and “How to Do Everything” books on consumer technology.

“In a fast-changing environment, McGraw-Hill Professional continues to provide new ways to deliver our content and respond to our customers’ needs,” said Philip Ruppel , president of McGraw-Hill Education International and Professional. “Our enhanced perpetual access program is another way to ensure that libraries around the world have all of the options they need to build eBook collections to best serve their patrons.”

With the publisher’s eBook library, users can access hundreds of thousands of pages of content in engineering, computing, medical, business and student study aid categories.

Gustavo Moura of the Google Docs team announced the availability of libraries and versions in Apps Script today. These two additions drastically change what can be done with Apps Script. The library functionality will be especially useful for those who write a lot of code using App Script.

The first step is of course writing the library itself. It’s pretty straightforward, but Moura provides an example of a library he wrote to call the WeatherService. The best part about the library creation tool in Apps Script is that it creates documentation based on the code comments. You can also hide certain bits of code from the user by ending its name with an underscore.

After you put all that hard work into writing the library, you will obviously want to save it. In Apps Script, the saving is now done through versions. It’s just like any version of software where the last stable version is available for all to use while you work on updates to the actual script. When you update the script to a stable state, publish a new version.

There will be many libraries over the next few weeks, months and years as more people begin building in Apps Script. You might even want to make use of the libraries that these users create. To share a library with another user, all you need to provide is your permission and a project key.

Once you get knee deep into library creation and using other libraries, there are three features that developers will want to take advantage of:

Documentation – In the Script Libraries dialog, you can click on the title link to navigate to documentation page for the library.

Development Mode can be used to test changes to a library without saving a new version.

Autocomplete in Script Editor – Typing in the editor will auto-complete your library function names.

Google already has a decently sized list of script libraries for users to play around with. The libraries range from the aforementioned WeatherService to a YouTube library that can read different kinds of video feeds. Check them out here to see if any of them tickle your fancy.

Distributing certain types of e-books like backlist titles via Academic Complete is advantageous in that publishers can participate in ebrary’s new approach to e-book acquisition and distribution. This approach includes working with libraries to leverage Academic Complete subscription usage statistics by discipline to determine where to strategically apply additional budgets to other acquisition models. It also involves streamlining and automating the ordering process through book vendors such as YBP.

Academic Complete was the industry’s first e-book subscription product and has been serving as a foundational collection to thousands of libraries across the globe for almost ten years.

Carole Correa-Morris, Head of Acquisitions at San Jose State University in an ebrary press release issued April 10 said that, “…We have been examining our Academic Complete usage statistics to strategically expand our patron driven acquisition program. By focusing on higher use subjects, we can better determine which titles to add to our consideration pool and only purchase those that are used.”

Kevin Sayar, President and General Manager of ebrary claims that by, “utilizing a variety of models including subscription, publishers can more fully monetize their monographic content, and libraries can affordably acquire the e-books researchers require.”

According to one of ebrary’s PowerPoints, U.S. e-book sales are expected to exceed more than $3 billion by 2015 and they are the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry. By 2015, public libraries are expected to increase their spending on e-books by 296%.

Hopefully these strategies will help public libraries keep up with the shift from print to e-books and save patrons a considerable amount of money.

“Starting today, millions of Kindle customers can borrow Kindle books from their local libraries,” said Jay Marine, Director, Amazon Kindle. “Libraries are a critical part of our communities and we’re excited to be making Kindle books available at more than 11,000 local libraries around the country. We’re even doing a little extra here – normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we’re fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book.”

The following Kindle book features apply to library check-outs:

• Whispersync technology wirelessly sync your books, notes, highlights, and last page read across Kindle and free Kindle reading apps
• Real Page Numbers let you easily reference passages with page numbers that correspond to actual print editions
• Facebook and Twitter integration makes it easy to share favorite passages with your social networks
• Popular Highlights show you what our community of millions of Kindle readers think are the most interesting passages in your books
• Public Notes allow you to share your notes and see what others are saying about Kindle books

“This is a welcome day for Kindle users in libraries everywhere and especially our Kindle users here at The Seattle Public Library,” said Marcellus Turner, city librarian for The Seattle Public Library. “We’re thrilled that Amazon is offering such a new approach to library ebooks that enhances the reader experience.”

Last month, Amazon launched an HTML5 web app called Kindle Cloud Reader, which is essentially a web-based version of the Kindle reader, so you can read the books on the web.

Amazon is expected to launch a Netflix-style book service as part of Amazon prime. Members would reportedly have access to a library of older titles as part of the $79 a year membership.

This month, Amazon also started pushing AmazonLocal deals to Kindle devices.

The project will even let users check out Kindle books, and save annotations and bookmarks, which will be preserved if the book is checked out again in the future. Pretty cool.

The company has partnered with OverDrive, a library digital content solutions provider on the initiative. “We hear librarians and patrons rave about Kindle, so we are thrilled that we can be part of bringing library books to the unparalleled experience of reading on Kindle,” said OverDrive CEO Steve Potash.

“We’re excited that millions of Kindle customers will be able to borrow Kindle books from their local libraries,” said Jay Marine, Director, Amazon Kindle. “Customers tell us they love Kindle for its Pearl e-ink display that is easy to read even in bright sunlight, up to a month of battery life, and Whispersync technology that synchronizes notes, highlights and last page read between their Kindle and free Kindle apps.”

“We’re doing a little something extra here,” Marine continued. “Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no. But we’re extending our Whispersync technology so that you can highlight and add margin notes to Kindle books you check out from your local library. Your notes will not show up when the next patron checks out the book. But if you check out the book again, or subsequently buy it, your notes will be there just as you left them, perfectly Whispersynced.”

It will be interesting to see how this move affects Kindle book sales. You could always make the case that libraries and book sales have always co-existed nicely, but many book lovers love their hard copies.

Last month, Amazon shut down API access to Lendle, a program that lets Kindle users lend books from their libraries to friends. Shortly after, Amazon restored the access.

Amazon’s new library lending program will be available for all Kindle versions, including all the mobile apps.

Low-income adults are more likely to rely on the public library as their main resource to access computers and the Internet than any other income group. Over all, 44 percent of people living below the federal poverty line used computers and the Internet at their public libraries.

Americans across all age groups reported they used library computers for Internet access. Teens are the most active users. Half of 14- to 18-year-olds reported they used a library computer during the past year, usually to do school homework.

"People from all walks of life use library computers to perform routine and life-changing tasks, from emailing friends to finding jobs," said Michael Crandall, senior lecturer and chair of the Master of Science in Information Management at the University of Washington Information School.

"More than three-quarters of those who used the library Internet connections had access at home, work, or elsewhere. Oftentimes, they needed a faster connection, assistance from a librarian, or temporary access in an emergency."

In the last 12 months forty percent of library computer users received help with career needs. Among these users, 75 percent searched for a job online. Half of these users filled out an online application or submitted a resume.

Other highlights from the report include:

  *37 percent focused on health issues. The vast majority of these users (82 percent) logged on to learn about a disease, illness, or medical condition. One-third of these users sought out doctors or health care providers. Of these, about half followed up by making appointments for care.
 

*42 percent received help with educational needs. Among these users, 37 percent (an estimated 12 million students) used their local library computer to do homework for a class.
 

*Library computers linked patrons to their government, communities, and civic organizations. Sixty-percent of users – 43.3 million people – used a library’s computer resources to connect with others.

"Library technology services have created opportunity for millions of Americans, but public libraries struggle to replace aging computer workstations and increase the speed of their Internet connections," said Allan Golston, president of the United States Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"This study highlights what is at risk, particularly for low-income individuals who heavily rely on the public library for their technology, if future public and private investment in public libraries doesn’t keep pace with demand."
 

The service is due out sometime in the first half of next year. It would reportedly begin with between 400,000 and 600,000 books. Prices would be set by the publishers. Google would get just over half of the profits, with the publishers getting the rest.

In addition to Google’s big project, libraries are starting to offer electronic books. Motoko Rich with the New York Times reports:

Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.

The idea is to capture borrowers who might not otherwise use the library, as well as to give existing customers the opportunity to try new formats.

With the increasing availability of electronic books to commonly used devices, we are likely to see a great increase in the amount of people actually reading them. I’m not ready to declare printed book anywhere close to dying, but it may mean bad news for the Kindle.

It makes sense to some extent though. This is the library we’re talking about. Library information shouldn’t have to rely on a corporation, and the group seems to have nothing but respect for Google. They’re just trying to cover their bases. Backup is never a bad thing.

"Google is an excellent partner,” Bits quotes Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan. "They are a corporation with a responsibility to its stockholders. Google could last 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years. We are academic institutions with a commitment to the preservation and use of scholarship and the scholarship record for the indefinite future."

Besides, they’re going to have things that Google doesn’t as well. Materials digitized through other means will also be made available through HathiTrust, they said in a press release. So far HathiTrust contains 2 million volumes and approximately 3/4 of a billion pages, about 16 percent of which are in the public domain. You can’t view this stuff yet though. A blurb on the HathiTrust site goes:

Where’s the search interface to all of the content in HathiTrust? There is currently no single global interface to the body of content in HathiTrust repository.

Be assured we are working with our partners to accomplish this—a way that takes into account the large number of different sources of metadata and the different strategies each of the partners has for managing that information.

I assume Google is one of these partners, but to be clear, this project is separate from Google. That’s the whole point, so it will be interesting to see if Google ends up providing the search technology for the database. While there are 25 libraries participating in the project so far, they are hoping to get the rest of those involved with the Google Books Library Project on board as well. Current partners are as follows:

To access the program users need a library card, access to the Internet and some downloadable software such as Adobe Digital Edition, the Mobipocket Reader or the OverDrive Media Console.

By visiting a library’s Web site users can choose titles, add them to a digital book bag and click the download button. Titles that are not available can be placed on hold to download later.

The digital content will remain on a computer for one to three weeks depending on the library and title, saving a return trip to the library.

One of the major distributors to libraries is OverDrive, which has licensing deals with publishers HarperCollins and Random House along with some music labels.

David Burleigh, OverDrive’s director of marketing, told Reuters the company has a catalog of 100,000 titles, works with around 7,500 libraries and has had millions of downloads of its media player and digital checkouts.

"We also know we are touching only a small percentage of each library’s patrons. Everyone we talk to is like ‘Wow, you do that?’" he says. "It’s a like this nice secret, that we of course don’t want to be kept secret."

Besides staying up to date with technology, libraries like the digital content because it does not take up shelf, something that is an issue for many libraries.