Meeting supply, demand of e-books

Over the last few months, the num­ber of e-books that you have down­loaded from the Delaware County Dis­trict Library to iPads, iPhones, Nooks, Kin­dles, Droids, com­put­ers and other devices has increased a lot each month. In Decem­ber 2011, the num­ber of down­loads totalled more than 2000 — a 240 per­cent increase from Decem­ber 2010. Over­all, e-book down­loads grew by more than 153 per­cent in the last year.

It was easy to see that the library needed to sup­ple­ment the num­ber of eBooks that were avail­able to our cus­tomers to sup­ply the grow­ing demand. For sev­eral years, we have been a mem­ber of the Ohio EBook Project, a statewide con­sor­tium that pro­vides down­load­able e-books, audio books, music and movies for all Ohio res­i­dents who have library cards at par­tic­i­pat­ing libraries. The Ohio EBook Project is a won­der­ful resource-sharing sys­tem, but the sup­ply of e-books is out­strip­ping the demand for them.

To help alle­vi­ate this sit­u­a­tion, the library recently con­tracted with another e-book sup­plier, and we recently pur­chased nearly 600 titles that will only be avail­able for DCDL cus­tomers. These titles are still listed in the library’s cat­a­log as –books, but the link that you click on to access the book is called “Blio EBook.” Blio is the name of the reader that is a free download.

Blio books come in full color. We have ordered dozens of travel books, how-to books, children’s books and fic­tion books. They are easy to check out and can be down­loaded to mul­ti­ple devices. As with any e-book, if you have any trou­ble down­load­ing a Blio e-book, sim­ply ask any of the librar­i­ans who are fully versed on nearly every device cur­rently available.

E-books con­tinue to be in demand, and we are dili­gently work­ing to increase their sup­ply. I think you will find Blio e-books to be a nice addi­tion to the thou­sands of e-books avail­able on the Ohio EBook Project.

Why do some radio sta­tions begin with K and some with W?

The short answer is “because the gov­ern­ment says so.” Accord­ing to World Book Ency­clo­pe­dia, in the days of the tele­graph, oper­a­tors started the prac­tice of using short let­ter sequences as iden­ti­fiers, refer­ring to them as call let­ters or call signs. Early radio oper­a­tors con­tin­ued the prac­tice, but with­out a cen­tral author­ity assign­ing call let­ters, radio oper­a­tors often chose let­ters already in use, lead­ing to con­fu­sion. To alle­vi­ate the prob­lem, the Bureau of Nav­i­ga­tion began assign­ing three-letter call signs to Amer­i­can ships in the early 1910s. Ships in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mex­ico got a K pre­fix and in the Pacific and the Great Lakes got a W. When the fed­eral gov­ern­ment began licens­ing com­mer­cial radio sta­tions, it had planned to assign call let­ters to the land-based sta­tions in the same way, but things got flipped dur­ing imple­men­ta­tion, and East­ern sta­tions got W call signs and the West­ern ones got Ks. The rules have never really been fol­lowed exactly, and there are plenty of exceptions.

Who is the Rev. George S. Rentz?

The Rev. George S. Rentz was a Pres­by­ter­ian min­is­ter who served as a Navy chap­lain dur­ing both World Wars. When an attack by the Japan­ese sunk his ship, the Hous­ton on March 1, 1942, as noted in Mer­ri­man Webster’s Bio­graph­i­cal Dic­tio­nary, Rentz ordered Sea­man First Class Wal­ter L. Bee­son to take the life jacket, then Rentz prayed and qui­etly aban­doned the wood he was float­ing on and dis­ap­peared before the other men knew what he was doing. Rentz was posthu­mously awarded the Navy Cross, and the frigate USS Rentz was named in his honor.

What kind of dog was the Nixons’ Checkers?

In the biog­ra­phy, Richard Nixon, it is explained that Lou Car­rol, a trav­el­ing sales­man from Texas, heard Nixon’s wife men­tion dur­ing a radio inter­view how much the Nixon chil­dren wanted a dog. So he sent them a black and white spot­ted Amer­i­can Cocker Spaniel that Nixon’s daugh­ter Tri­cia named Check­ers. Check­ers died in 1964 and is buried in Wan­tagh, N.Y., on Long Island’s Bide-A-Wee Pet Cemetery.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@ delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked.

Posted by Mary Santos on Jan 28 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.