eBooks -- The Latest Container

It has been a wild ride in the profession of librarianship -- especially in the past thirty years. We have adapted to new technologies and formats of delivering information.

Linda Braun, a speaker at the Rural Library Conference held in Frisco, Texas in 2011, referred to the formats as "containers", and in a sense, the term fits.

At the Paulding County Carnegie Library, where the first "container" or book was borrowed in 1916, a book about agriculture, the formats in which we have delivered information has kept up with times. We  have seen vinyl long-play albums (LPs), 8-track tapes, cassettes, compact disks, movies on VHS, movies on DVD, books recorded on cassette, books recorded on compact disks, books recorded on PlayAways, and now; books, music and video delivered electronically and downloadable on an electronic "reader" device.

It has been said, or predicted, that the book is dead, that the written page bound between two covers, will no longer be viable or wanted in a society of gadgets, gizmos, electronics, bandwidth, and technological advancements. Perhaps there will come a time where a microchip need only be embedded on the body, and the simple "thought"  of a book or information will then be downloaded onto this microchip. Who knows what the future will hold? Those who served as librarians in the past could certainly never have predicted what the "container" would look like in the year 2011. After centuries of information being delivered via the printed page, now we are bombarded with changing technologies and information delivery methods that are evolving and changing on almost a yearly basis.

Although the Paulding County Carnegie Library has kept up with the times, and although the latest "container" in which to deliver information is "electronic", the foundation of the library -- as long as I am director -- will always be books. There will always be a need for the contact with the traditional format of information, books -- which followed the first mode of delivery of information -- the oral word. I pray that the day never comes when ironically, the oral word will be the only way to remember a quaint format called "a book".

Visit your historic Carnegie library in Paulding. See where it all started. Sit back among the thousands of books, close your eyes and imagine. Imagine the years gone by, the dizzying speed at which our lives have been transformed by technology. Then, open your eyes, reach out for a book, open the covers, and read.