As ALA Midwinter Closes, A Crucial Moment Looms For E-Books

Is the library e-book question about to heat up? At the recent Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, TX, ALA executive director Keith Fiels and president Molly Raphael informed a meeting of ALA’s Working Group on Digital Content and Libraries that ALA officials had arranged meetings from January 30 to Feb. 1 in New York with publishers currently restricting e-book lending, including Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin. The announcement suggests that at a time when demand is exploding, librarians are determined to push the issue of e-book lending with publishers.