This week, I spotted that my local public library service (Lincolnshire County Council) have launched an e-books service. Hooray for them – they’ve also recently upgraded all the PCs and introduced wifi in my local branch library.
With many local libraries being cut or placed under threat, and their technological relevance criticised (often ignorantly), even by the PM, it’s great to see investment going in to library technology in Lincolnshire.
The Lincolnshire county libraries e-books site is at: https://lincolnshire.libraryebooks.co.uk/
(It’s not obvious who provides this e-books platform, but it appears Warwickshire County Council—and possibly no-one else—has chosen the same provider.)
It got me wondering: how many UK public libraries currently provide an e-book download service?
To try and find out, I’ve created a (publicly-editable) Google spreadsheet wiki, containing the names of the 232 top-level local authorities in the UK, along with a column indicating whether or not they provide an e-book download service {1|0}, and columns for the URL and provider of that service.
At the time of writing, there are 48 public library e-book download services listed. If I’ve missed one that you know about, you can edit the spreadsheet yourself.
I’ve then used a simple, 4-part Yahoo! Pipe to turn the CSV data output from that spreadsheet into an RSS feed containing only those councils that do provide downloadable e-books.
The finished RSS feed is at: http://bit.ly/e9U2GP
Next, if I can remember my way round the GeoNames/Nearby.org.uk/Google Maps APIs, I’ll have a go at plotting the e-book-providing libraries on a map.
