#jane pyper

[torontolibrary]

TORONTO (May 27, 2014 ) – The Toronto Public Library Board has appointed Anne Bailey to the position of Acting City Librarian, effective June 30, 2014. Bailey is currently Director, Branch Libraries and responsible for the operations of all neighbourhood...

Our City Librarian is stepping down this coming June.

[sparkcbc]

In many different ways, electronic books are different from their paper counterparts.

But as Peter Rukavina (Hacker in Residence at the University of PEI Library) argues:

[F]or some reason, we’ve opted to acquiesce to a system that takes the regular old model we’re all used to for managing and circulating physical objects and, absurdly, applies it to digital objects.

Back in February, Peter wrote about how he kept fellow Prince Edward Islanders from borrowing an electronic edition of Learn Norwegian - Level 1: Introduction to Norwegian from the public library, in part because the Mac version of Overdrive's software didn't allow him to "return" it.

This is crazy, and we must demand better, more rational systems from our library, if only because we’re making up systems and processes here that will be with us for generations.

Intrigued by Peter's experience, Spark assembled a panel to discuss e-books, public libraries, and artificial scarcity.

On the panel:

Jane Pyper, City Librarian for the Toronto Public Library

Carolyn Wood, Executive Director of the Association of Canadian Publishers

David O'Brien, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and co-author of E-Books in Libraries

We plan to air a shorter version of this panel on an upcoming episode of Spark, but the whole thing was so interesting we wanted to publish it here in a longer form.