Bexar County in San Antonio will be launching the first pure digital library in the United States in the fall. The library plans on outfitting a massive computer lab and intends to lend out 100 e-readers to the public. The big hyping point is that the organizers want to make the entire operation give you the look and feel as an Apple Store.
Many libraries in the USA and Canada often do business with companies like Overdrive, 3M, and others to facilitate digital book borrowing. When libraries engage in a digital strategy, it is often tertiary to their existing book collection.
The new project in Bexar County will be entitled BiblioTech, and is dubbed an experiment. Nelson Wolff is the man spearheading the initiative and said that the entire project will cost $250,000 for the first 10,000 ebook titles. The intention behind this entire system is to allow people living in outlying areas to get access to books where they normally wouldn’t.
Although the library did not mention what company it is doing business with, I have a feeling it will be dealing with the 3M Cloud Library System. 3M often provides libraries with both “Discovery Terminals” to checkout books to any tablet, PC, smartphone, or MAC, but it also distributes e-readers to them, too.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
