This is another Web Thing I’m glad the OCL Challenge folk included.  I had started and account and played around with this 3 years ago when I started at OCL.  I haven’t had much chance to use it since (although I have signed a number of people up for it).  My original impression of it was that it was clunky and hard to use.  Revisiting it, however, I was much more impressed.  I searched for a book on Excel and found “Excel for Dummies”.  I loved the chapter navigation on the side to jump to a specific topic in the book, and the keyword searching across the full-text was incredible (wish I could have that on real-life books!) but it took a few minutes to get used to needing to click on the button for “Next” to go forward in the book rather than just scrolling down the pages like on a website. 

I then browsed the collection, sorting the results by “Newest First”.  I found “America’s Top 50 Jobs” (or something like that, I can’t be bothered to look — although NetLibrary does give a handy citation entry for the book) and jumped through it to find “Librarian”.  That example hammered home for me that I think, personally, this would be a great tool for reading a book that only has a short section on the topic I’m interested in.  I’m not sure I’d want to read an entire book, or fiction, in this format. 

Still, I’m glad I got a chance to look around at it some more — I think it’s a lot less clunky than it used to be.  Or I’m just much more open to the idea of eBooks!  One or the other!