Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Week 9, #22 - e-books, audio books

First I went to our website to search for ebooks. It was not clear how to get to the audio books. I like to listen to audio books - so it would be cool to find out how to do that.

With e-books there are many disadvantages to paper copies. I sure wouldn't want to read a novel online. So I tried to think of factual books that might lend themselves to ebook format. First I looked up California hiking. Three books came up - one which was for northern california. I opened it up - but each page was slow to load, it was hard to fine any interesting hikes and I didn't see pictures.

Next I tried cookbooks - thinking that would be a great topic for ebooks. None found.

I tried to find books on Rwanda - found an interesting one - a SJSU ebook. It wouldn't let me open it without an additional plugin that I couldn't download.

Finally - decided to look at the most popular ebook - Ireland Adventures. I love Ireland. The book was somewhat easy to use - but it's a toss up of buying a paper copy and copying the relevant pages as compared to slowly trying to go through the ebook to find pages to print.

Okay - I just saw a link to the audio books. It took me to an alphabetical list. I found something interesting - though it wasn't clear if it was an ebook or an audiobook. When I opened it I got an error message.

That's enough exploring of our library's ebook website. No wonder our patrons are frustrated!

1 comment:

Virtual Services Team said...

Sorry it was so frustrating to navigate through the ebooks. I agree with you that customers must be frustrated, too. It is also hard to access some of these from the computeres at work since there are limits on what we can download and install. I will try out some of them and see what I can do.