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By David Rothman

image A small Oregon library will lend out three Sony Readers to patrons—complete with public domain classics such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland. The experiment begins in January.

Sony Readers use the industry-standard ePub format, with zillions of nonDRMed books available from sources ranging from Project Gutenberg to Google, so there’s less chance of the Readers becoming obsolete. Alas, that happened with the old Rocket eBooks, which made “e-books” a dirty word to many libraries. The Rocket eBooks could natively render just a proprietary format. Only with conversion could they pick up books in nonproprietary formats.

Now, here’s the part that Gary Price of Resource Shelf and I really like about the Sony Reader program, as chronicled in a local newspaper. “While the e-books will contain some content when patrons first start checking them out,” a library official “said they are encouraged to find other books to download.

“They’ll be provided with a tutorial and a list of Web sites where they can download e-books. The downloaded content will remain on the readers for the next patrons who check them out.”

So the Austen and Carroll books and other classics now on the three Readers are just a start. Within the bounds of taste and copyright law—this won’t work with commercial books—library patrons can add whatever they want. This is even better than social tagging. Complete books!

The North Bend Library Foundation paid for the Sony Readers for the North Bend Public Library, and the foundation’s benefactors can truly think of the Readers as gifts that, well, in ad-ese, keep on giving.

Hello, Jeff Bezos? As a former Texan, why not help out the library system in Laredo, which will soon be America’s largest city without a bookstore?

(Big thanks to Gary for the tip!)

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