Author Archives: Cath Dishman

I want to like e-books, I really do. I like the idea that I can access my book anywhere I am, from any device I happen to be using at the time. I own a Kindle and for books that are available on the Kindle, this is the case: I can use my phone, my tablet or my Kindle and the reading experience is pretty much the same. The problem is that academic books haven’t really caught up. There are too many different platforms and too many different access models. As a former e-resources librarian I had to grapple with this on many occasions. For our students this is a barrier, they don’t understand why they can’t download the e-book to their device and access it when they want or why if someone else is in a particular e-book they have to wait and I can kind of see where they are coming from. Continue reading →