“…Two gadgets away from nirvana.” I had a good chuckle over that line, which is part of a much longer post about the possibilities for e-books from SimonWaldman.net. The author outlines some good points about the way that certain pieces seem to be aligning in a positive way for the e-book market (both for the publisher, and for the reader). Honestly, I am not (yet) a fan of e-books at all, from the angle of one who has managed or provided access to a fairly large (several thousand) collection of e-books in a library, as well as from the patron angle. One of the best implementations of e-books that I’ve seen in the past few years is Safari Tech Books Online (available for libraries through ProQuest). Other e-book collections and services, however, are not particularly user friendly as of yet, including those provided by netLibrary, eBrary, and Overdrive. The last vendor in particular bugs me because it does not support or allow e-books to be downloaded onto an iPod. I’m sure my local public library and its consortial members have put lots of money into providing access to these e-books from Overdrive but this glaring omission in functionality renders the service useless to me.