After reading chapter 7 of Developing Collections to Empower Learners by Sue C. Kimmel (2014), I started thinking about ways of bringing ebooks into my school library.

We have a BYOD program that runs reasonably successfully and many students choose to purchase textbooks in an electronic format, so I know that there are some students who prefer to access their reading materials via a screen. I have also come across many students who enjoy reading fiction online.

While introducing some form of ebook lending system would take more research and support from above, the idea of pre-loaded e-readers sparked my interest and I intend to investigate this possibility. I am particularly interested in having genre-specific e-readers that are pre-loaded with a range of titles from a range of reading levels. We have so many students who want to read within a series or genre and students are used to a ‘Netflix’ menu of possibilities, so why not try bringing the two together?

While there will be problems (it is not going to possible for the e-readers to go home with the students), I believe that the information we can potentially gather about the reading habits of our students and the likelihood of their accessing ebooks over paper makes the experiment worthwhile.

Kimmel, S. C. (2014). Developing collections to empower learners. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=1687658