News Report #1

“Ebook Summit Preview: Should Kids get Ebooks in Schools?”  By Eric Hellman, August 24, 2010.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/886504-264/ebook_summit_preview_should_kids.html.csp

Many people are starting to believe that librarians should be phased out.  The number of under staffed libraries in American high schools has gone up tremendously in the past few years.  There are many people who believe that libraries are outdated, that the internet has made it so that books are available with the click of a mouse.  One student said that while doing a project on the Philippine-American war he found more resources on the internet using Ebooks than in the school library where he only found a couple of scant encyclopedia paragraphs.  There has been a lot of talk about implementing the use of electronic readers to high schools, preloaded with textbooks,  which would just be another added cost to the already expensive library upkeep.  Whether or not this is going to ever happen is still up in the air but parents have been pressuring schools about the idea.   The article also spoke quite a bit about how schools with higher librarian interaction with students, teaching them how to find information, scored better on testing done to schools in the same area with less interaction.  This discovery negates the idea that librarians are outdated.

I think that it would have been weird going to high school and using an electronic reader rather than going to the library or having textbooks.  It would be a very convenient thing to do, but also sort of inconvenient.  What if the reader runs out of batteries?  What if you want to highlight or underline information to remember later?  I have a couple of classes where I have the online version of the textbook where underlining and highlighting is an option and I feel that even though it is a little more difficult to concentrate on, it still does the job at a lower cost than print books.