The Fairfax County Public Library system has received a financial boost to its efforts to increase its electronic book collection, as more people use Nooks, Kindles, iPads and other devices to download material.
Fairfax libraries recently received a $100,000 donation from Friends of Reston Regional Library, a nonprofit group that aids area libraries with expenses through the sale of used books and other fundraisers.
The donation comes at a time when demand for e-books and publications is rising and the library system’s operational funding is being cut.
“We have a high percentage of people in our area who are very techie,” said Kelley Westenhoff, a Reston resident and spokeswoman for Friends of Reston Regional Library.
The nonprofit group and area residents want to see the public library system lead the region in offering electronic material, she said.
The trade-off of having more electronic readers, she said, might be that the group’s used-book fundraisers, which generated about $60,000 annually for local libraries, could be less profitable than in previous years.
The trend toward downloading e-books kicked into high gear last year, library employees said.
“Last Christmas there was a big surge of giving [electronic readers] as gifts. . . . Literally every single e-book we had was checked out over that [holiday] break,” said Deb Smith-Cohen, assistant branch manager of Patrick Henry Library in Vienna.
E-book sales in the country have risen from 0.6 percent of total trade market sales in 2008 to 6.4 percent in 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers. In 2010, e-book sales in the United States totaled $114 million, according a study the association released this month.
Electronic formatting has shown to be more popular in some genres, such as adult fiction, where it captured 13.6 percent of the net revenue market share. Area librarians said children’s books, specifically picture books, are not very popular among e-readers yet because the format does not translate as well as do text-only books.
“Our collection is driven by budget and demand,” said Trish Van Houten, assistant coordinator for collection management and acquisitions for the county library system.
In November, just before Christmas, the system had 2,177 electronic titles checked out. In July, more than 6,250 titles were checked out.
“It’s always interesting to watch new technologies take hold and become standards,” Van Houten said. “We saw the same thing 10 to 15 years ago with tapes and CDs. Any time there’s a new technology, everyone has to learn how to use it.”
Many public libraries use OverDrive, a digital distributor founded in Cleveland in the 1980s, to provide their digital stacks for readers. Learning to make the switch from buying e-books to renting them can take some getting used to, library staff said.
“I think the technology is in transition right now,” Smith-Cohen said. “It’s not where [readers] want it to be. It’s clumsy for most first-time users.”
For those buying books on their devices, a book can be just a click or two away. For those downloading through the library, the process is several more clicks away, but free.
“The first time you use your Nook, as a user you’d go to the vendors and download their software. Then you select your book and download the book to your computer desktop,” Smith-Cohen said. From there, the e-book can be transferred to the electronic device through docking by USB or WiFi.
E-books are available for most popular devices, with the exception of Kindle, which announced in April its intention to partner with OverDrive and make renting e-books available to Kindle users by the end of the year.
Library staff members said that e-book lending has one obvious benefit to the system – electronic books always are returned on time, whether the reader is ready to return the material or not. Once the three-week maximum checkout time has expired, the reading devices can no longer open the electronic publications. The e-book then must be checked out again.
“Things that are available online are never lost or damaged, and they always come back on time, too,” Van Houten said. “That’s nice.”
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