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Introduction: The End of Books?

Electronic Bookshops

If you do not happen to have visited any of these sites thus far, we would recommend you take a trip to a few when you have a spare twenty minutes or so. It can be an eye-opening experience. Look up yourself, or your family name, and you may see some rather surprising things. Then take a topic and try it. For example, "sustainable development" on Amazon brought up several hundred titles. Photovoltaics, 47. Telework, only 8 (thus far). Even a non-word like "eco-efficiency" (who really knows how to spell it?) brought up 6 Uncover article titles and two books at Barnes and Noble. The Uncover database, by contrast, turned up 34 articles on telework and 199 on photovoltaics. And while you have to order and then wait for your books (24 hour delivery in many cases, but if it’s out of print they’ll often go to work for you), Uncover gets the text of the articles to you within hours.

Our point here is that it is simply worth having a look at, and then thinking about. You will almost certainly turn into a user yourself (even if you have to use the neighbor’s kid to order it), if you are not already one. And this of a service that didn’t exist only two year’s ago, at the time we organized our first virtual conference with the OECD (view the artifacts of that conference).

On the other hand, we here are not at all worried that we are going to see books and paper disappear in the decades immediately ahead. But we will surely change enormously the way that we access them. And your local bookstore? Well, that is a matter of what you find there. If it’s knowledgeability, an informed exchange, sheer love of books, their smell and feel, and the serendipity of letting your eye wander and the interesting things that can come of this. . . well, we do not see that as being replaced by even the greatly improved version of all this when it comes on line (which surely it will, and soon)

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Electronic Bookshops

"Amazon.com has books at savings of up to 40%., offering 2.5 million titles. Whether you're shopping for a bestseller or a book on a highly specialized subject, we've got what you're looking for. Find any book in seconds when you use our powerful search engine. Just type in the title, author, subject, or keywords and click the Search Now button."

Go to Barnes & Noble "The World's Largest Bookseller Online"

"One day after suing its biggest online competitor, giant bookseller Barnes & Noble (BKS) opens its own online bookshop. The new site adds features live author chat sessions, book reviews, commentary, book excerpts, audiovisual effects, and author biographies." Take your pick.

Go to Blackwell's Books

"Blackwell's Electronic Services has been specially designed to provide a single source of electronic subscription information to academic, medical and corporate libraries. The Blackwell's team of specialists work in close partnership with customers and publishers to provide products and services designed for individual customer needs."

Go to Uncover

A Current Awareness and Document Delivery Service UnCover is a database of current article information taken from well over 17,000 multidisciplinary journals. UnCover contains brief descriptive information for over 7,000,000 articles which have appeared since Fall 1988.

Go to Research-IT

A Web Tool which is intended to help researchers locate documents and other things they are looking for on the Web or elsewhere.

If the above don't offer what you are looking for try Global Listing of Electronic Booksellers, a site which offers comprehensive coverage of alternative sources of rare, specialized, academic and other books.

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