The number of kids who now have ereaders or tablets has increased enormously during the Christmas break (now why would this be so you might wonder?   Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm)

School librarians are happy and worried by this:

Lets look at the worried side of this first.  There seem to be a couple of main points about this increase in kid’s use of ereaders that worries school librarians, the first one is to do with what was rather charmingly referred to as “Digital Citizenry” by one school librarian.  In this context it relates to illegal downloads of ebooks.

This particular librarian had been approached by a number of the kids in her school with the request to help with installing ePub ebooks on their shiny new ereaders.  In the course of helping them she noticed that the ereaders had way more ebook in them already than the kids could possibly have paid for…  So she not unreasonably feels that the subject of theft of digital media needs to be carefully addressed in schools now.

I was slightly puzzled by this, since if the kids already had filled their ereaders with illegal copies of ebooks, how had they done that if they apparently needed help installing ePub ebooks?  Sort of gap in the logic here.  But none the less, the point is a good one.

So, the fact that illegally downloading ebooks is actually no different to going into a book shop and stealing paper books from the shelves there, it is something that needs to be discussed with the kids in schools.

The other worry is to do with the kid’s choice of fiction reading matter.  It seems that school librarians prefer to discuss a kid’s choice of fiction with them rather than simply let them wander into the school library and take away any old book they find.   It is apparently a matter of matching the kid’s development with the most appropriate reading matter, so Librarians prefer to use paper books for non- text book lending, as they feel that a face to face discussion about the kid’s choice of book is important, and can’t see how to achieve this with ebook.

Seems simple enough to me, have a central download point in the library beside the librarian’s desk, where the kids can connect their ereaders to the schools electronic library to download their fiction ebooks.  So they can talk to the kid before the choice and download is made.

So, those are the worries.   Not too serious seems to me.

And the positive side of ereaders in schools?

There seems to be one major benefit as far as school librarians are concerned.  This benefit is quite separate from any school policy about providing ereader or tablets for all the kids in the school, this is more about the kid’s own private ereaders.

What school librarians are seeing is an amazing upsurge in recreational reading in the student population.   In particular this is noticeable in the USA, where recreational reading is not exactly a big thing – to put it mildly.  What is being seen now as more and more kids get their own ereaders is that they see the pleasure and advantages of reading, both for pleasure and for information.

Many public libraries are now working with school libraries to introduce kids to the possibilities that ereaders give them, and apparently this is falling on very fertile ground indeed, with many kids becoming members of public libraries, who before the advent of ereaders in their lives would have run a mile to avoid going into a public library.

Thos of us who have been following the development of ereaders and ebooks over the last couple of years will find this no surprise… ereader seem to encourage people to read prolifically, so why should school kids be any different.   Encouragingly this doesn’t seem to be a temporary state of affairs either, once launched onto ebooks, people continue to read and read and read and………………………..   This appears to be a universal reaction to getting an ereader.

So whilst, as with everything, there are a couple of worries about the spread of personal ereaders among school kids, the benefits are so much greater than the drawbacks, and I for one am vastly encouraged to see that people’s pleasure in reading is on the increase across all ages and social classes apparently.  Can only be a good thing.

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