eContent Readers

For the past 20 years, I have witnessed the evolution and growth in the distribution of electronic content. For the first ten years this centered primarily around the aggregation of full-text scholarly journal content and it also included a few early efforts in creating electronic editions of books. Growth of the scholarly journal content has continued to grow with the monumental efforts of primary and secondary publishers in addition to major universities and consortia. Off-shore data conversion vendors have made these digitization efforts affordable and have now partnered with publishers to digitize most of the major newspaper back files. Research in libraries today looks very different from 20 years ago aided by the ability access all of this content on the web.

Unfortunately, accessing electronic book content has not progressed in the same manner. Ten years ago the first attempts at eBooks began and we have all seen the starts and stops along the way with countless readers. It appears that the latest manifestations of readers are now catching on and will continue to grow allowing better functionality and more content. This generation of eReaders attempts to handle magazine and newspaper content in addition to books, but nobody is satisfied with the way this serial content works today. Efforts are now underway to create standards around how to display newspaper and magazine content along with advertising.

I look forward to the day when I can read my books, search the journal literature, read my magazines, and browse the morning paper all on one device. Given the recent explosion in the current adoption of eContent it is likely this day will come.