BendTech

One of the things I love about Bend is our public library.  It is a centerpiece of our community – friendly, modern, useful, and bustling with activity.  Which is why I was delighted to see that in these troubled economic times library use is up 10%.  It flies in the face of long-running predictions that libraries would suffer as more and more people turn to the internet, and is a notable contrast to the layoffs that hit the book publishing industry back in December on a day now referred to as “Black Wednesday“.  So it was a bit of a surprise to hear myself recommending to my friend Bryan that he stop using the library.

Bryan and I were chatting about how his daughter had become a voracious reader, something he was naturally excited about.  The problem was that in preparation for a trip his family was taking to Costa Rica for two weeks, he and his daughter had gone to the library and checked out a half dozen books to satisfy her reading appetite while they were away.   Schlepping these rather bulky, mostly hardback, tombs around while they were on vacation was no mean feat, but anything for daddy’s little girl, right?

She finished them in four days.

As a techno-geek, my response was immediate and obvious, “Get a Kindle!”  The Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-book reader, is about the same form factor as a normal book, but can hold 100’s (1000’s?) of digital e-books.  It seemed like a perfect solution to the problem – his daughter could read for months, if not years, with all the content these things can hold. (more…)