eBooks and Audiobooks

It was interesting to poke around in Project Gutenburg. I was surprised that it also included some orchestral scores and even movies of nuclear bomb explosions, although there were not many movies listed.

I downloaded Cheiro's "Palmistry for all" 1946 ed (one of the top 100 requested titles) which certainly arrived quite quickly. I initially asked for the 'plucker' version which I could have viewed on my phone, but expect I would have needed a magnifying glass to read it. I soon realised I should have asked for the HTML version. Be interesting to see if the SLT senior library management really cut it according to Cheiro's basis!

I can see this may be a growing area particularly for academic texts which may have a relatively small audience. (For instance, I could see my uni student children requiring ebooks in future rather than hard-copy texts.) However, I expect I may still be forking out the same sort of money for ebooks as I do now for hard copy ones.

As far as audiobooks are concerned, I still prefer professionally read titles so expect that if the library gets these we will be paying reasonable licence fees. However, it is good to know that there are free versions of many classic titles available if people wish to download them.