First Book-less Public Library

In 2013 the first book-less public library in America opened in Bexar County, Texas. The $2.3 million library's book collection is entirely digital. It features rows of iMacs and iPads for in-house browsing and hundreds of tablet computers and eReaders for checkout. Bexar County's BiblioTech library hosts a steady stream of visitors from other states and from as far away as Hong Kong to learn from the experiment and to gain ideas for local applications. eBooks and eBook readers didn't catch on until Amazon produced the Kindle in late 2007. The sale of eBooks was almost flat before that, but by 2008 sales increased to $100 million and by 2012 that number was $1.3 billion. The hugely popular Apple iPad, which was released in 2010 and had sold 121 million units by the first quarter of 2013, provided a further massive surge in the popularity of eBooks. In addition to being an all purpose tablet computer, the iPad is an excellent eBook reader with a wide variety of reader applications available for every format of eBook. I love a printed book as much as anyone, having built a 6,000-volume personal library, but I do most of my reading digitally today. When I travel or just stop somewhere for a cup of coffee or whatever, I can carry hundreds of books, including a serious Bible study library, instead of the one or two books I was limited to in the past. It is my habit to underline and annotate books as I read, and I can do all of that and more with eBooks. There are downsides to eBooks compared to print books, but like it or not, Bexar County's BiblioTech library is the future.

(Friday Church News Notes, January 10, 2014, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143)

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