3M Cloud Discovery Station at SacLib

There was a small launch ceremony complete with ribbon-cutting, demo on the discovery station and an iPad by the 3M rep, and SacLib staff standing by to assist patrons with getting the app and downloading their first 3M Cloud titles. One of the attendees won the drawing for a Nook HD –  grin as wide as a mile.

I remember visiting the 3M booth at ALA in New Orleans two summers ago when the company was just about to launch its cloud e-book service, and thinking that 3M had taken every torturous procedure of OverDrive and made them simple. Certainly, our patrons thought so today, as they downloaded the app voluntarily during the demo and proceeded to borrow e-books at once.

I have to say I’m a fan of this new e-book platform. Library patrons can read on their phones, e-readers (except Kindles) and tablets (including Kindle Fire), and there’s even an option to read books on their PCs. It’s plain which titles are available now for checkout because of the big green Check Out button, and returning e-books early is a simple click of red Return button. Titles sync among all of a patron’s devices. Audiobooks are  apparently in the works as a future enhancement. But most importantly, 3M has an agreement with the publishers who pulled their titles from OverDrive, and those popular works are again available through 3M in digital format. Win-win, for sure!

Obsolescence

I updated iTunes over the weekend, and now it’s crashing my laptop. I’m thinking that the new features are really designed for Windows 7, and I’m still running Windows XP. I can no longer back up the iPhone and iPad, even after uninstalling programs from the laptop and deleting hundreds of photos from the iPhone. I’m going to have to depend on iCloud for the moment, until I can afford to replace the laptop.

It is disconcerting to find that information changes almost instantly on both phone and pad. It should be doing that on the laptop, too, but XP can’t handle the new features.

So, now the question is: do I even need a laptop any more? Almost all my stuff is in the cloud on Dropbox, Flickr, Shutterfly, Google Docs, and now iCloud.
Even Overdrive, from whom Sacramento Public Library gets most of its digital collection, now has apps, and very few of its downloadable items need to go through the desktop Media Manager any more.

If I do decide to forego the laptop, I’ll need to upgrade my printer to one that can print directly from the iPad and iPhone. Right now, it needs a helper application to be running on the laptop to handle those wireless jobs. Sigh.