Taoyuan International Airport now has a digital library

But you can’t check out ebooks, dammit.

Taiwan’s main airport has just launched a reading lounge. These lounges are stocked with around 2k paper books and about 30 gadgets you can read on, a mix of iPads and dedicated ereaders.In terms of formats, they had the good sense to limit themselves to only Epub and Zinio.

This story isn’t all that impressive, for a number of reasons. First, if someone lent me an iPad I’d play games or browse the web. I wouldn’t read on it. Second, you can’t actually borrow ebooks so it’s really more of a play toy area for adults.

The main reason I’m not all that impressed by this story can be explained by the picture at right. I took it on my way to CES back in January.

You’re looking at one of many kiosks where you can get free power and an internet connection. As I see it, anyone who is in an international airport very likely has a laptop,ereader, and/or smartphone.  It goes hand in hand with having enough money to take an international trip. They might want to play with a gasget, but if they want to work or read, they brought their laptop, tablet, or ereader with them.

But now that I’ve thought about it, I think there’s a market niche here, and it doesn’t look like anyone has pursued it yet. There are news stands and bookstores in airports. Heck, you can now buy a Sony Reader in most airports.

Why not rent ebooks?

Think about it. Anyone at an airport with an ereader has disposable income. If you use Overdrive’s technology, you can actually rent an ebook for a week and then have it expire. You don’t have to bother with returns, lost copies, or whatever.

I think airports might be the one place that people would be willing to rent, rather than buy, the ebook.

What do you think?

Nate Hoffelder

View posts by Nate Hoffelder
Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader. He has been blogging about indie authors since 2010 while learning new tech skills weekly. He fixes author sites, and shares what he learns on The Digital Reader's blog. In his spare time, he fosters dogs for A Forever Home, a local rescue group.

1 Comment

  1. […] · No Comments · digital library /* */ I’ve posted in the past about an e-reader petting zoo in an airport, and I’ve even posted the occasional image showing how you could buy an e-reader from a […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to top
https://the-digital-reader.com/2011/03/12/taoyuan-international-airport-now-has-a-digital-library/
the-digital-reader.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-31
62596
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HR7RNCMVTLM7DFF2XNL744HJY23QEGTG
<urn:uuid:9c837e53-fc95-467d-9641-b5bca71fa260>
2021-07-29T11:43:27Z
172.67.186.218
text/html
sha1:3A2TNZZRK2KDWY6GJQNTNGFZLEUG6JA6
<urn:uuid:9e349593-e91b-469d-b065-69b79e7ffa23>
https://the-digital-reader.com/2011/03/12/taoyuan-international-airport-now-has-a-digital-library/
response
<urn:uuid:fce58fca-6a2f-4e28-8f35-8b97db35114e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-31
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July/August 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-169.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/