Not that I think an all-ereader library is a great substitute (considering how much stuff is NOT in digital)…OR a “coffee bar”…but it may have figured into the decision.

You read it by holding the book sideways – compared to a normal book the print is vertical so you read from side to side not top to bottom. They’ve really tried to make the book as compact as possible, so the white margins at the page edges are smaller than normal and chapters do not start on a new right-sided page.
The fond is small, but not too small – comparable with the smaller fonds used for mass market paperbacks.
The paper is very thin, but feels nice and surprisingly firm. Not at all comparable to those cheap old-fashioned tiny bibles, my first association. I wondered about solidity (after all, you have to flip the page twice as often compared to a “normal” book), but the book is bound (sewn in) not glued, so that is a good thing.

It can be tricky to flip the right page due to the thin paper, but the book is very light, easy to hold in one hand and it stays open easily, unlike the fatter mass market paperbacks who want to flip closed all the time causing cramped fingers.

All in all, I’m pleasantly surprised. I don’t know whether it can beat e-books by being as compact and easy to use (I don’t own an e-reader, in fact I’ve never even seen one in the flesh since they are not widely on sale in mainland Europe), but it is certainly very small and lightweight and very easy to read at the same time!

Books are not shortened or written to be extra short for this format.
The secret to its compactness lies in the use of extra thin paper (40 grams or even 25-22 grams) and a specialised way to print this thin paper. Not surprisingly, the printing house is specialised in Bibles.

The pages read like those of a normal paperback book because the pages are printed to be read from side to side, not top to bottom. If you open the book, the two pages form one “normal” paperback page – hence the name “dwarsligger”.

Being Dutch myself, I have access to more info than is available in English..

I bet the Boston prep school’s e-collection gets hacked and trashed this school year. I mean, perfect target for bored students .

I could see it working for a small collection or restricted section, where you’re not allowed to remove books anyway, but for a whole library you either need a very small student body or a lot of very well timetabled students. Personally, I’d rather take a book home to study; preferably a book filled with someone else’s notes and thoughts and random doodles, but I’m the kind of philistine who always advocated writing in books, especially if they’re going to be read by someone else in their future. That’s something that’s rather lost with most current eReaders.

Re: copyright – I don’t think you should have to request it (I live in the UK, it’s automatic and I’m very grateful for that) but I do think term should be reduced, maybe just to the author’s lifetime, with only certain rights extending beyond that. Estates end up with a lot of power, and though of course an author’s work should still provide for his or her family after their death, I think 70 years is way, way too long. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind if it ran out within the author’s lifetime, if there were options to renew and a limit on the number of times you can renew – or options [em]not[/em] to renew, so anyone else who wanted dibs had to wait until the current holder gave a definitive “no”. And maybe received a proportion of the royalties on whatever was done with it by the new copyright holder?

Say the term was 25 years; Author X realises the novel 1 has come up for renewal. It’s never made much money and the author has little attachment to it now, so s/he decides not to renew. Author Y buys the copyright, rewrites it, and republishes it. Author Y receives the advance and two thirds of the royalties, author X receives the other third, since s/he was responsible for the original idea. Filmmaker Z buys Y’s version, and the royalties from the film are split in the same way. And so on.

It’d probably all grind to a halt quite quickly, with a lot of disputes, but at least people would have access to it.

Regardless, I think it’s an oddball thing to do, but I have no doubt that the students’ families can go pick up ereaders at $300 a pop like us little people buy beers after work.

underground library for “real people who actually READ, not lame electronic poseurs.”

Disguise and password required.

One of my college professors claimed that in fifty years we’d all be sitting in dark caves reminiscing about the people we used to know who could read and do math.

and sticking in a coffee shop at school. Seriously, the caffeine addiction will kick in by college…no need to encourage it so early.

and i bet this is a conspiracy to jack up the tuition. and a conspiracy to weed out the less affluent students.

Her response was that she would smuggle her own personal book collection (500+ titles and growing) along and establish an underground library for “real people who actually READ, not lame electronic poseurs.”

Her words, not mine.

It’s an interesting thought, but as the parent of a middle schooler, who regularly rescues thumb drives, cell phones, and calculators from clothes tossed in the laundry, my instinct would not be to spend a lot of money on anything a teenager can leave on the bus.

All you have to do is give a decent amount of time for authors to monetize their backlist if and when they break out, and give their kids a bit of time to cash in on the whole “author is deceased, finite supply/increased value” thing.

I don’t get it. They already have books that the students can use freely. Why get rid of them?

BTW — TVs & coffee shops? Guess the prep school needs to make some moolah selling coffee to their students?

I suspect someone owns some Amazon & Sony shares…or something.

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/

I may be a dinosaur clinging to my books, but where I grew up books were my best companion and the only way to see a world beyond poverty alcoholism and abuse. The idea that children may not even have that escape in the future is just heartbreaking to me.

I know this example is one high cost private education school, but if others follow this example…

“Instead of a traditional library with 20,000 books, we're building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books,'' said Tracy, whose office shelves remain lined with books. “We see this as a model for the 21st-century school.''

I’m not sold at all. I was never the kind of person who could study in a library, and I am still not the kind of person who can read long materials on a backlit screen. I can’t “study” material on a screen at all. That means I love reading fiction on my Kindle, but when it comes to studying and non-fiction, I still want my physical book, and I want to take it out of the library so I can sit somewhere like Starbucks or whatever.

This is the part that makes no sense to me:

“In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.”

My local library has study carrels. You can also use your laptop there. They didn’t spend $20k to make them “laptop friendly.” They just have a wireless router in the library and they have electric outlets along the walls. And how are all those students who are supposed to be studying without the eReaders (because they don’t have enough for everyone) supposed to concentrate with the three large flat-screen TVs?

Gah, the whole thing drives me up a wall.

I’ve been buying a bunch of books for a elementary school library in a depressed area of my city and I’ve been bringing my great new finds (I’d recommend “I Need My Monster” or “A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever”) in to work for other people to look at before I donated them to the school.

I can’t tell you how many people have smelled the book as they opened it and commented how great “the new book smell” is and then tell me about a favorite book. These kids won’t have that memory.