I gave a session tonight for the public about ebooks and ebook  readers in Australia. About 25 people turned up.

Many of the participants were over 50 with either vision impairment or with parents with vision impairment. One man was 93, brought along by his daughter so that he could try out the e-ink and text enlargement. One of my colleagues suggested running a session aimed at students in the New Year. I can see that this would work well.

I was definitely not in an academic library anymore, though – we served tea and coffee and fruit mince pies and Christmas cake. I was very nervous about whether I could pitch it at the right level after giving so many presentations to other librarians or university staff and students. I started by asking them what they wanted to know. Most wanted to touch the device. I spoke for about 20 minutes before handing it around. I  felt a bit wobbly when one of the audience asked “what about those of us who do not have the internet?”, as I had a big chunk about getting ebooks to read for free via download. He was happy when I told him that the Kindle came with a way to get books without having the Internet.

I was impressed with how engaged people were when I handed the Kindle around. Some preferred to read it sideways. They liked the readibility of the e-ink. The read-aloud mechanical voice was not a hit. Reading “The Tales of Peter Rabbit” and rushing straight past the bunny pictures was not pretty. One man came up with a scheme where libraries would sell Kindles to their users, then the library would by the books from Amazon so that their readers could “borrow” them for a couple of weeks – “from anywhere in the world”. I had a great discussion about how there are no technical reasons why many models would not work – but they are all limited by publishers’ revenue models.

The slides that I used are below. I have also added the information from the handout from tonight’s talk.