The Age newspaper recently reported that a new e-reader will be stocked by Borders and Angus & Robertson in time for Christmas. This comes at the same time as the announcement that Hachette Australia e-books are now available through Apple’s iBook store which is the first time these titles have been available to Australia’s in e-book format. With the increasing availability of e-books and e-readers in Australia, what does this mean for library collection development as a whole, and young adult collections specifically?
For young adult collections, it shouldn’t mean too much. Scholastic recently released a study of children’s and teenager’s reading habits with a particular focus on e-books. This survey discovered that a third of kids believe they would read more for enjoyment if they had access to e-books, however current trends show that 66% of children and teenagers surveyed agreed with the statement “I’ll always want to read books printed on paper even though there are e-books available”. Unfortunately there is no way to predict the way in which e-books are adopted in Australia, as it is a situation in which only time will tell. So what about librarians wanting to develop young adult collections now?
In my opinion, e-readers do not have a strong adoption rate in Australia so far, so providing access to young adult e-books may not be in great demand. There should still remain a strong focus on printed young adult collections, however we must also prepare for the future. Access to young adult e-books should be explored and implemented within the service wide e-book distribution services where possible. The interest of the teenagers themselves should also be garnered, perhaps by survey or casual conversation, to establish if there is a genuine desire for electronically available material outside of reference and study resources. Essentially, the possibility of providing e-books needs to be explored, however, our main focus should still be printed young adult collections.
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