What do you think?  This is the provocative title of an online commentary in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s an interesting read.  The author’s an obvious technophile, and presents some arguments in favor of vastly increasing our access to e-book content, both in the area of required course texts and library collections.  Both things have of course been happening for years, gradually.  The author, Marc Prensky, thinks it can’t happen fast enough.

The online comments are worth reading as well. They present both philosophical objections, and practical implementation issues that librarians are all too familiar with, including copyright, licensing, and “ownership” problems, a myriad of incompatible e-book desktop and mobile device reader applications, rapid technical obsolescence of the content, and others that make it difficult to see how we’d ever get to an all e-book world very quickly. The UST Libraries are working through these issues on an ongoing basis, and we’ve greatly increased our e-book content over the last few years in tandem with the increase in e-journal content.

It’s worth asking, even if we can eventually go “all e-book” should we?