Currently Brooklyn College owns about 5,000 e-books, including both a NYLink and a CUNY collection. These books enjoyed 1,293 circulations in the 2002/03 academic year; their catalog records appear in CUNY+. We are presently doing a trial of Safari Books, a technology collection. The Academic IT staff (avid tech book readers) are testing this product using two seats we've purchased on a trial basis. We will see what they think of the collection and then possibly subscribe.
E-book collections are burgeoning. netLibrary now offers medical, reference, and IT collections. Gale is selling what it calls a Virtual Reference Collection. Indeed, most major publishers now make e-versions of their titles available. Professor Susan Vaughn recently attended a day-long conference on e-books, and it seems as if publishers see public libraries as their saviors. Software enables e-books to circulate to readers' PDAs, but people's willingness to read full-length books on tiny screens remains to be fully tested. An added note: these books are quite expensive.