Things 18 and 19

EBooks & iTunes

We recently exceeded 200 ebook titles in the library.  I have to admit I've never read an ebook and I don't own a Kindle, but when I was distance learning I used online electronic resources and journals extensively so I guess ebooks are an extension of that really.  I think from a students viewpoint it is such a handy tool.  To be able to login to the college website and read a book without ever leaving your home is the ultimate in convenience.
The one thing that disappoints me about academic ebooks is that they are basically scanned in documents.  To my mind I always thought that ebooks would be these amazing texts full of useful hyperlinks, instant translations, references etc.  In alot of fiction this is the case.  If you're reading about France for instance you can click on the word and it will give you a wikepedia type entry with details like population size, climate, national currency etc. I guess the amount of work to do this sort of text linking would be hugely time consuming for academic books and journals, and it's probably unnecessary.  In their favour like any other pdf academic ebooks do have search and find facilities which are very useful.

With the increasing popularity of iPads and other more affordable tablets, I really believe that ebooks will see huge growth.  The Kindle suffered from having such limited functionality, kind of expensive for just an ebookreader.  But with a tablet you have internet, music, photography, word processing and a host of other applications and you can just download an ereader app and hey presto it's a kindle with a thousand other apps.  And yet, I still don't want one,  I love my paperbacks.

ITunes is an interesting development, I can totally see the usefulness of having an academic ITunes library.  Why not? Instant hub for anything you might want, makes perfect sense.  I think it would be useful to be able to download to your iPod/smart phone etc and be able to listen to something in the car or on the luas/bus while commuting.

Completely off topic, but I think students are really lucky to have so much instant access to materials.
When I was an undergraduate in the 1990's I remember trolling through index cards and looking up library catalogue on old terminals, there was no internet, it was such a chore to 'find' information, never mind sifting through what was relevant or not?  I wonder did our research suffer greatly or do students now adays just spend less time doing the initial 'search'? 
I think it would be a great challenge for students to have to do an assignment without internet access.  But then what would be the point?  Technology is constantly changing and you can't reinvent the wheel.