infoneer-pulse:

What, however, if a well-stocked national digital library system could multiply the number of books enjoyable not just by young people but also their parents, the role models, whom schools and other institutes could encourage? Significantly the Scholastic Report—full text here—says: “It is clear that letting kids choose which books they want to read is key to raising a reader. Nine out of 10 children say they are more likely to finish books they choose themselves.”

Here is another eye-opener. Just a quarter of the students in the Scholastic survey have actually read digital books. But 57 percent would like to. One-third say they would read more books for fun if they could use an e-book reader. Certainly this jibes with a Harris Interactive poll of 2,775 adults. Fifty-three percent of e-reader users said they read more often than six months before, or much more than the 18 percent of non-users. Even considering the desire to justify purchases, those are impressive numbers.

Shouldn’t libraries adjust in a major way to the possibilities of e-books and, in fact, use technology to strengthen themselves as bastions of literacy, so that, for example, books can better match YouTube’s popularity?

» via The Atlantic