Earlier this year, writer Kevin Kelly wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine that envisioned a future in which all books in existence will be searchable from a single source, if not totally available to everybody with an iPod. Libraries and corporations are scanning around a million books a year (the Google Book Search Project doing the lion’s share) but one real problem remains: there is no current technology for transmitting and reading these digitized books that can compete with the printed book, or as David Coursey alluded to in 2005: e-books suck.

I wouldn’t go as far as Jim Louderback in countering that “e-books rock” in his rebuttal, but his point that the problem “is a device issue and not a medium issue” is certainly the spirit that will hopefully see the achievement of Kelly’s dream.

While we wait for technology to catch up, Digital Library Services is doing its part to contribute to the amassing corpus of digitized books. Recently, DLS begun by scanning a small collection of University of Iowa Press Short Fiction Award Winners from the 1980s. These books are out of print, but are still an important piece of the writing landscape. The first 6 of these books are available now at http://uipress.lib.uiowa.edu/

Currently, e-books are probably most useful for exposing scientific and factual information to search engines, but the UI Press Books here are written to be read through as stories. Read on screen, digitized books often look pretty bad. For an economy of scale, books must be digitized quickly and the digital files must be touched as little as possible. But, untouched, these page images are often skewed, with uneven margins and blurry text. DLS has taken the time to correct skew and margins, to make reading the short stories on the screen as enjoyable as possible.

There will come a day when a device comes along that will make curling up with an e-book as enjoyable as it is now with your favorite yellowed, dog-eared novel. Until then, check out the UI Press Short Fiction award winners and read some of these award winning short stories.

— Mark Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian