The Future of Libraries

Tim Martin discusses it in the Telegraph.

From the article...

Until recently, the privilege of consulting books like this has been largely reserved for the very rich or very scholarly. Full facsimiles are rarely produced these days, making second-hand copies frighteningly expensive, and the only other way to see the form in which these things were originally committed to paper has been to seek out the holy calm of the rare books rooms at one of the great libraries.

Now, however, a combination of technological progress and financial expediency is causing libraries to rethink their approach to some of their most valuable assets. Last month, the British Library released an application for Apple devices that allows readers to download and read some 45,000 books from its 19th-century collections, at a subscription fee of £2 a month.

At the same time, it began to sell scans of older and more valuable treasures, such as the Leonardo notebooks and the Mercator atlas, through Apple’s iBook store.

Designed for iPhones and iPads, these are formatted like books, with attractive page-turn animations and several enhanced features. Pressing a button flips Leonardo’s mirror-writing or reveals a gloss, for example, while the Carroll manuscript offers the slightly surprising opportunity to have the entire book read out loud by Miriam Margolyes.