by Sarah Statz Cords
Welcome to Part 2 of our interview with librarian and readers’ advisor Jane Jorgenson! Part 1 can be found below.
RAO: What trends in RA and patron service in general do you see coming?
More and more of what we’re providing is in non-print form (digital, electronic, audio). For magazines and reference resources this has been ongoing for a while but with the advent of ebooks and all the devices that go along with it (Kindle owner here!) leisure reading is beginning to be impacted by this trend as well. I’m not sure how this will impact RA, maybe not at all because a book is a book, but I do think it is an area that we will have to acknowledge and work with.
Interviewer’s Note: For the next few risky questions, I did advise Jane of her right not to answer them (as they smack more of personal book taste). But I’m glad she did!
RAO: What currently very popular book do you think is overrated?
Oh man, this is a tough one (mostly because my own taste is pretty plebeian) but I mostly rant about those saccharine ones like The Shack, The Last Lecture, anything by Nicholas Sparks and Mitch Albom.
RAO: What one book do you wish more readers would find?
There’s one I suggest all the time for book groups in particular called When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka. This is a spare little book about the internment of the Japanese during WWII and is written by a poet. Beautifully done.
RAO: Do you think e-books will mean the death of books?
No. Might they be the death of the print format? Possibly. But I’d guess not. The printed book format is a beautiful piece of engineering when you think about it. Think how long the book has looked pretty much as it does today. When phono records first emerged the death of the book was predicted, didn’t happen. When movies and tv came along the death of the book was predicted. Audio books, same thing. Nothing yet has supplanted the printed book because it is just about perfectly functional. Ease of use will always be important. And nothing is easier then opening the cover of a book and beginning to read.
Thanks again to Jane Jorgenson! Please also note that Jane will be presenting, along with Barry Trott and Jessamyn West, a preconference at PLA 2010 titled Readers’ Advisory 2.0: The Next Dimension.
