Ebooks in schools...inaccessible, expensive, and discriminating?

Accessibility to Ebooks and the use of Ebooks in general seems to be an elusive concept in many school libraries today.  I first started wondering about Ebooks when I was checking out CD's and Playaways in my high school library.  I teach in a very large, fairly affluent school district and had a long commute.  I was trying to fill the travel time with something valuable, so the librarians showed me all the options.  The options were mostly books on CD and Playaways for listening while driving, but I was also introduced to the Kindle and the use of Ebooks in general.  They explained that they didn't have many titles on Ebook and they generally did not check them out to people yet, but they were hoping to at some point.  

Five years later, the Ebook is still being stifled, mostly due to a lack of understanding of the Ebook concept, and a lack of county policy and procedure regarding student check-outs and Ebook copyright laws. 

 

When they first came out, publishers of Ebooks loved the reduced cost of having to print/ship the physical books.  On the other hand, they did not want to make Ebooks accessible to public and school libraries because, unless technology drastically changed, libraries would only have to buy one copy, ever, which meant a huge drop in profit.     Instead, Ebooks and Ereaders became solely a consumer product, not available even if libraries were interested.  For school libraries, whose choices for purchase are limited to a select set of vendors, this meant either Ebooks were not available at all, or they were only available for exorbitant prices.  For research and reference materials, which would garner great usage, it was justifiable to purchase materials in Ebook format from a vendor.  However, libraries cannot justify spending for example $100 on a $12 paperback, especially when their budget is already severely constrained.  This made it virtually impossible for librarians to delve into the Ebook concept.  

But libraries should make the use of Ebooks a priority in my opinion.  As technology has changed, people want digital access and have moved toward purchasing their own digital copies of materials, rather than go to a library to see a hard copy. Some lawmakers have even made efforts to close public libraries, citing that the libraries are not offering resources that people need in the format they need it.

In terms of school libraries, Ebooks would offer not only more accessibility but also accommodation of special needs.  Christopher Harris, director of the School Library System for the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership in New York State and blogs at American Libraries’ E-Content, sums the benefits up nicely below:

"One of the areas of greatest potential for ebooks in school libraries is in accommodating students with special needs. The US Department of Education–funded BookShare.org program supplies free DAISY-formatted ebooks, offering text-to-speech enhancements with read-along highlighting to students with a qualifying print or visual disability. Other publishers, including Capstone and Orca, provide ebooks in the high-interest/low reading level (hi-lo) field."

 Ebooks and School Libraries | American Libraries Magazine. (2012, January 13). Retrieved September 14, 2015, from http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2012/01/13/ebooks-and-school-libraries/.

In the past two years, there seems to be a major shift occurring to not only bring Ebooks into school libraries, but also make them affordable.  Vendors such as Follett, Mackin, and Scholastic have been working with schools to bring both affordable Ereaders and Ebooks into the schools.  One way that Ebooks can be included in school libraries, but also assure that a fair amount of money is being paid for the product over time, is to offer them on a subscription basis.  Another way is to require that the Ebook can only be checked out to a certain number of people at a time, and that a new copy be purchased after the book has been checked out a certain number of times overall.  Ebook adoption at the district level has proven to be effective, more so than at the individual library level.

Over all, it is clear that transition to the Ebook concept is going to take time, understanding, and development of copyright law and protection before it will be fully endorsed and supported.  With the emergence of Ebooks and Ereaders, such as Kindle, comes new difficulties and hindrances, such as those for blind students and others with disabilities that the Ebooks and Ereaders cannot address.  Here is an exciting article about how Amazon is trying to make the Kindle more accessible to the blind:

Sidhu, M., & Yingling, V. (n.d.). Amazon Kindle: Is it Coming to a School Near You? Retrieved September 14, 2015, from https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/fr/fr32/2/fr320209.htm