If you can’t find the right library e-books for your new Kindle, Nook, iPad or other gizmo, you’re not alone. More than 100 patrons of the District of Columbia Public Library were lined up electronically today for 10 e-book copies of The Racketeer, John Grisham’s new novel about the murder of a federal judge. Some 400+ D.C. library users awaited 60 electronic copies of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the best-selling fiction title on the New York Times list. And a digital version of The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling, was not even in the catalog of the D.C. public library system. Could a well-stocked national digital library system—in...

As we mentioned the other day, e-books can present a problem for people on the underside of the digital divide. The e-book reader is only one part of the equation; another part is affordable Internet access—and while broadband access isn’t required for downloading something the size of an e-book, it certainly makes it easier in general. Today Comcast announced the launch of a new program meant to address the one-third of the US population without broadband access. The Internet Essentials program is aimed at low-income families with children who qualify for free lunch under the federal National School Lunch...

On her LiveJournal, writer Seanan McGuire makes an important point about the nature of the digital divide and how it affects paper versus e-books. People below the poverty line—which at least 15.1% of Americans are, and probably more than that since it goes by an old standard of poverty—can’t afford e-book readers, or e-books to go on them. They can afford paper books, because books are cheap. The problem is that printed books are starting to go away due to the encroachment of e-books. Writes McGuire: [E]very time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably,...