Title: Electronic Books and Electronic Readers: Emerging Issues and Questions
Sponsor: The LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee
Date: Friday, April 23rd
Time: 2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Location: CHANGED ROOM! Baruch College Vertical Campus--room 11-150 on the 11th floor.

Speakers & Presentations

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Alycia Sellie & Matthew Goins - Brooklyn College

"The Rights of Readers and the Threat of the Kindle"

"This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."--Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com

What happens to our rights as readers when books go digital? Librarian Alycia Sellie and technologist Matthew Goins will challenge the status quo of book digitization and argue that current digitization projects rob readers of well-established rights that they have held historically with print. More than just an issue of convenience, we will outline what changes when books go from print to restricted digital format. We will examine restrictive licensing agreements and closed technologies used in
current digitization projects that deny readers long-held rights of fair use. Sellie and Goins will examine those private corporations who have invested in digital book projects and whether their principles are something that we as librarians, consumers and informed readers should accept or avoid.

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Rajeev Jayadeva, Stefanie Havelka, Adelaide Soto - Lehman College

"Sony E-Reader Borrowing Program at Lehman College"

Lehman College has just launched our Sony Reader borrowing program and will share the details in a presentation. Lehman currently has 10 PRS-600 Readers. Library staff will discuss their evaluation of the product; Sony Reader vs Kindle; the logistics of lending them out, marketing, and how it operates.

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Maria Kiriakova, Gretchen Gross, Karen Okamoto, Mark Zubarev - John Jay College

"Student Reactions to Sony E-Readers"

In the summer of 2009, four members of the John Jay library staff tested 168 incoming freshmen on their reaction to the Sony E-Readers. A questionnaire was distributed to the participants of the testing. The test attempted to analyze and evaluate the limitations of ereaders in terms of circulation, content acquisition, dealing with pdf files, comparison with Kindle, etc. The study was finalized and written up as an article which was accepted for publication in the March 2010 issue of "Computers in Libraries".

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Robin Brown - Borough of Manhattan Community College

"Ebooks; A Point of View from an educated consumer"

What exactly are ebooks? Where did they come from? This presentation will pay homage to Michael Hart, as well as give some of the latest updates from the format wars. What is going on in the consumer marketplace, and how does that effect libraries? Who are the biggest vendors, and where did they come from?

Finally, where does that leave all of us as librarians and big book consumers?

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There is no charge for this event, however please RSVP if you plan to attend to Junior Tidal (jtidal@citytech.cuny.edu) or Kevin Reiss
(kevin.reiss@mail.cuny.com).