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By Joanna

image The weather here in Toronto, Canada, is 18 degrees F and feels like 8 degrees, according to Weather.com’s statistics for 8 a.m. today. That’s just right for snuggling up inside with a good e-book without first having to visit a bookstore or library. In fact, our wintery winters come up in a Canadaeast article headlined Local libraries an overlooked option for free ebooks. The article also laments the lack of Kindle compatibility, which patrons often don’t realize until after the fact.

But here is what caught my eye: hard numbers, at last, about actual numbers of books bought, checked out and wished for.

Granted, this is only one book and one library system, but it still shows that demand is growing. For Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the Toronto Public Library bought 800 print copies and 15 e-book copies. 1,500 people are on the waiting list for the print copy, and 50 are on the waiting list to check out the e-book. From the article:

“‘We see it at this stage as a small but growing segment of our (collection),’ said Jane Pyper, chief librarian for the Toronto Public Library, which is considered the largest public library network in Canada and the busiest in North America. Toronto residents can access about 8,000 e-books through the library’s website and were on track to have checked out 150,000 e-titles by the end of 2009, she said. That compares to about 30 million borrows of regular books.”

The article says librarians love the e-books too. An Edmonton librarian explains: “When we order an e-book, we don’t get it in a box, we don’t unpack it, we don’t label it, we don’t shelve it, we don’t physically check it out, we don’t return it or reshelve it, and it doesn’t get stolen or damaged—so there’s a whole bunch of stuff that made us very interested in considering e-books.”

So what are the downsides? The big one right now is no Kindle support, and the librarians quoted in the article put the blame squarely at Amazon’s feet. Anne O’Shea, Anne O’Shea, assistant manager for electronic resources with the Vancouver Public Library, says the e-book industry “needs to work together to solve the format issue”:

"What I’d really like to see from all of those vendors is for them to do their digital rights management in a way that isn’t such a barrier for patrons, because patrons know they can download some of this stuff for free online illegally and if you put too much of a barrier in place they’re not going to want to do it through the library."

Hear that, Amazon?

Credit for the cam shot taken this morning: The CBC.

Related: Nook in Canada: It works, from MR.

 
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