"Librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people."

Isn't that a beautiful quote? It's from an article about how Stanford's engineering library went digital. They built a new library building and reduced the size of the physical collection by 85%. That's huge, right? Downloadable content is the future, people.

The article also pointed me toward this interesting story about how Arizona State University tried to use the Kindle DX instead of text books. The program never got past the pilot because the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) pointed out that Kindles are not accessible to blind students.

And just today, an article I wrote about ebooks appeared in the RILA bulletin! I was predicting that ebooks would be come viable in public libraries sooner than some people thought. (Notice how I don't give an actual timeline. Clever, no?) I mentioned DRM as an obstacle to providing ebooks to patrons, but the ASU story also raises the issue of the accessibility for people with disabilities. Guess we better put on our thinking caps!