I enjoy building things, especially if there is a “let’s see what we can find to make this work” factor involved.

With that in mind, it should be obvious why Building a High Speed Scanner from Trash and Cheap Cameras has me salivating.  I think I shall have to examine the materials and time needed for this…

found via Librarian.net

ALA TechSource has a brief blogger forum post on the state of E-Book Readers.  The quote that I think is most worth thinking about comes from Jason Griffey:

E-books are the future of reading in a very real way, simply because at some point they will be too cheap to not use. One of my staff brought a receipt to me this week for a laptop that the library bought in 2000. It was $3600. I just priced netbooks for my library, and can get a machine that is ridiculously more powerful than the year-2000 laptop for under $350. The Kindle, and most other e-readers, are hovering around the $350 or so dollar mark right now. In ten years, what will they cost? How can paper continue to compete with Moore’s Law?

Not only does it make sense, for reasons of legality (terms of use) and usability, to wait before purchasing and implementing E-Readers in a library, but it also makes sense from a monetary standpoint.  Amazon’s Kindle is king of the hill right now, but I think the big one is yet to arrive.  Watch for it, however:  when the convergence of price, usability, and usefulness happens, you want to be ready.