E-Books Now Available At The Bath County Library

Warm Springs, Va – E-books are now available through the Bath County Public Library. If you have a library card and a computer with access to the internet, you can download ebooks and audio books for free through the library. Alan Bobowski is the Director of the Rockbridge Regional Library.

“Now is the time for public libraries to ebook and downloadable audio book customers or to keep book customers who are moving into the ebook area” he says. “If we had waited another year or two, people would have found alternatives to their public library and would have lost them as patrons.”

An e-book, which is short for electronic book, is a digital version of a printed book which can be transferred to and read on computers and other electronic devices. You select your book from the library’s website and then download it to your computer. You can read it on your computer or if you have an e-reader, such as a Nook, Sony Reader or a Literati, you can transfer the ebook to that device.

And you can download e-books directly to a smart phone. Audio books, which are recorded books that you listen to, are also available for download from the library. You can download your e-book selection at home, saving you a trip to the library.

“We don’t know what people are really going to want” says Bobowski. “Our book selectors are making sure that the consortium has at least one copy of the most popular books. But they’re also spending a little bit of money on classic books, on what we call the back list. For example Danielle Steel’s latest book may be very easy to get, but perhaps her back list, all the other things she’s written is not so easy to get anymore. And so we’re filling in back lists of very popular authors.”

There’s a 7 or 14 day loan period on e-books and downloadable audio books and then the book deletes from your electronic device. Currently you can’t download books for use on Kindles, but Kindles will join the program in the fall.

Bobowski recently did a presentation at the Bath Library demonstrating how to download ebooks from the library. Donna Carr of Wilmington North Carolina uses the Bath Library when she’s in Bath in the summer and on holidays. She was at the presentation to learn more.

“I learned a lot about Nooks, and e-readers” she says. “I really didn’t know anything except that I wanted to learn about it and maybe get one. I have so many paperbooks and I feel that it’s a waste in our modern world. I love the idea of having everything on the screen, in memory.”

For more information call the Bath Library at 540-839-7286 or visit the Rockbridge Regional Library website at www.rrlib.net.