The future of libraries and books

As the debate about bookless libraries rumbles on, two interesting articles were published this week.

Stanford ushers in the age of bookless libraries
The periodical shelves at Stanford University’s Engineering Library are nearly bare. Library chief Helen Josephine says that in the past five years, most engineering periodicals have been moved online, making their print versions pretty obsolete — and books aren't doing much better.
According to Josephine, students can now browse those periodicals from their laptops or mobile devices.

Kindle and iPad books take longer to read than print
It takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 or an iPad versus a printed book, Jakob Nielsen of product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey.
The study found that reading speeds declined by 6.2% on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle compared to print. However, Nielsen conceded that the differences in reading speed between the two devices were not “statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability” — in other words, the study did not prove that the iPad allowed for faster reading than the Kindle.