CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY

Rahm’s Readers Summer Learning Challenge

Look who dropped by the Library on Friday to announce our newly revamped Rahm’s Readers Summer Learning Challenge. Kids can participate through hands on activities around Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. Full STEAM Ahead starts June 17 - drop by your local library today to register!

CPL + Chicago Blackhawks READ Campaign 

A big thanks to the Chicago Blackhawks for their support of our Mabel Manning Branch (sponsoring a Teacher in the Library and a CyberNavigator) - and for letting us pass out these great Patrick Sharp READ posters at the game. As you can imagine, it wasn’t just the kids who wanted one!

Why Printed Books Will Never Die

From Mashable:

Measured en masse, the stack of “books I want to read” that sits precariously on the edge of a built-in bookshelf in my dining room just about eclipses 5,000 pages. The shelf is full to bursting with titles I hope to consume at some indeterminate point in the future.

It would be a lot easier to manage if I just downloaded all those books to an iPad or Kindle. None are hard to find editions that would be unavailable in a digital format, and a few are recent hardcover releases, heavy and unwieldy.

But there’s something about print that I can’t give up. There’s something about holding a book in your hand and the visceral act of physically turning a page that, for me at least, can’t be matched with pixels on a screen.

Yet the writing appears to be on the wall: E-books are slowly subsuming the printed format as the preferred vehicle on which people read books. E-books topped print sales for the first time in 2011, a trend that continued into 2012. Just this month, Bexar County, Texas announced plans for the nation’s first electronic-only library. A recent study from Scholastic found that the percentage of children who have read an e-book has nearly doubled since 2010 to almost half of all kids aged 9 to 17, while the number who say they’ll continue to read books in print instead of electronically declined from 66% to 58%.

The hits keep coming.

For those who prefer their books printed in ink on paper, that sounds depressing. But perhaps there is reason to hope that e-books and print books could have a bright future together, because for all the great things e-books accomplish — convenience, selection, portability, multimedia — there are still some fundamental qualities they will simply never possess.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Donald Sobol: 1924 - 2012

Donald J. Sobol, author of the “Encyclopedia Brown” series passed away. He was 87.

Thank you for the wonderful books and memories, Donald.