Great presentation! It was interesting to see what is going on in other libraries and think about how that is/will effect us in the medical library world. Some things like location based gaming, not so much. But e-books most definitely.

“Jason saw the future of e-books resting on platforms not devices. He said that the e-book hardware is dying. (Interesting since everybody and their grandma got a Kindle for Christmas.)” — Yes, I said all of this.

“He said there are group of users, him being one of them, that are singular universal device users. They don’t want to carry around a separate reader device. If he can’t get it on the iPhone he doesn’t want it. I can see that.” –That was Joe, not me.

:”So if devices are dead, the growth is in platforms. He specifically mentioned, Blio and Copia. Copia is a platform for e-books that is intended to act as a “social reading experience.” Readers can comment, discuss, pass on thoughts, stories, and other things to others who are also reading the same book. I am not sure how Copia would do in special, academic or hospital libraries. I see it totally rocking for public libraries and book clubs. Blio (has an anatomy book on their front page) preserves the books original layout and graphics. Joe mentioned that Blio allows instructors to insert quizzes within the books so that after somebody has read a chapter they can get quizzed on the information. (I do not see this anywhere on their site though.)”

–This entire discussion about Blio and Copia is my stuff, not Joe’s.

Also, the quiz thing isn’t mentioned on the Blio site, that comment was drawn from a demo of the software that I was given at CES2010.

Just making sure I’m not held to something that Joe said, and vice-versa.

We have just included text messaging as an option for users to communicate with our reference desk Meebo IM aggregator at GWUMC Library. Too early to give you any feedback on how popular it is, but just FYI.