Crash Course in eBooks by Michele McGraw & Gail Mueller Schultz

Author:Michele McGraw & Gail Mueller Schultz [Michele McGraw]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610698634
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

Standalone Kiosks

One of the challenges of connecting your patrons with your eBook collection is that they can't see the books when they come to the library and browse the shelves. An additional issue is that your patrons will need to have some way to get eBooks from the vendor website or your library's local platform to their devices. As a way to address these issues, some vendors provide standalone kiosks that patrons can use to view and access eBooks. The types of kiosks and standalone access points vary by vendor, but in general, the goal of these products is to make your "invisible" eBooks visible to your patrons. The kiosks allow patrons to browse your eBook collection and often allow them to check out the books also. These types of free-standing displays can help you promote your collection, allowing patrons to browse what's available for check-out while in your library or at a community location.

As a way to make your collection more visible to patrons and to help address access issues, these vendor kiosks can be useful. However, there are also challenges with using them in your library. If you are contracting with multiple vendors, each will probably offer you their own kiosk, so you may find you'll need multiple, different kiosks to provide equitable access to all the parts of your collection. If your eBook collection has felt invisible to patrons, a kiosk that highlights only part of your eBook collection still may be a worthwhile investment, but you'll need to be ready to assist patrons with any questions or concerns they have about accessing all of your eBooks, not just those with the separate kiosk. And, of course, these kiosks take up physical space in your library, which may be at a premium. You want to have this in a prominent place, or near other parts of the collection that your eBook readers may use, but in many libraries that space can be difficult to find. You'll also need to understand what roles and responsibilities your library takes on with this equipment, and what remains with the vendor.

It's also possible for you to create your own eBook station or kiosk. It would be as easy as dedicating a computer in a prominent location to this service. The landing page for this computer could be the vendor website or the eBook page on your own website, and it could have any software that's needed to transfer eBooks to a user device already installed and ready to use. This model lets you highlight multiple vendors and more closely connects to the experience your patrons would have when they're using eBooks on their own devices, but it does require using library computers and other equipment to provide the service.

You may find that your patrons prefer to search for and check out their eBooks from home or other non-library locations and aren't as interested in accessing them in the library building, and that's part of the learning process with your new collection.

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