E-books a new way of reading. A study of digital books in public library.

The main purpose of our thesis is to discuss the subject e-books from a Swedish public library perspective. The aim of the thesis is to locate and analyse statistics in regards to lending electronic books in public libraries. With this background a text analyse have been done, which views different arguments about e-books. We have studied the current statistics about lending e-books to the public users, the statistic material was gathered from the two main providers of e-books, eLib and E-biblioteket. With this statistic report as a background, arguments from scientists, journalists and users of e-books have been studied. By using argumentative analysis we examined whether the arguments are understandable, durable and relevant and if we could find separate point of views from the different groups that we have studied. We observed both in the texts and through the statistics, that there is a significant raise in the lending of e-books in the public libraries. In our study we observed that fictional e-books dominate in the lending statistics. This surprised us since most people in the argumentative analysis argue that non-fiction is the most suitable choice as an e-book. In addition, the e-books for children and youths are not as popular as e-books for adults. Lastly, we noted that lenders are generally very positive to e-books as a hole. They find that the biggest advantage with e-books is the flexibility and the accessibility. For the e-book users the problem is not the basic idea of e-books that most find satisfactory, instead the problem is that the technology and that the use of e-books doesnt compare with the cosy feeling of a paper book.Uppsatsnivå: