| Summary: | This master thesis aims to examine how public libraries in Sweden are practically and ideologically equipped to deal with e-books, outside of the dominant distributor Elib. The study also aims to find out what’s required of the book market and the public libraries to make further progress in the question of e-books. In Sweden e-books are still representing only a small amount of all the library loans and an even smaller amount of the commercial book market. The methodological and theoretical ground for the thesis is Grounded Theory, and the survey is based on interviews with publishers, librarians and distributors. The conclusions of this thesis are that the public libraries lack resources to invest in e-books, and that they also lack in knowledge about the media and its readers. It also exposes that both internal and external collaboration efforts need to be further developed. In addition to this it also becomes clear that the libraries’ and publishers' digital presence is crucial in their efforts to reach out with literature to the readers. The findings above are closely interwoven with two conceptions of a more abstract kind. The first relates to the issue of the identity of the public library and the question of how they should manage their mission in a still developing digital world. The second concerns the issue of the value of the e-book vs. the value of the printed book. Both publishers and libraries still see the printed book as superior to the e-book, wherefore libraries are reluctant to invest in books that will not be a part of a traditional bookshelf collection. In order to work more actively with the development and further adapt to a future digital society, it is these factors that the book market and the public libraries must work on in order to reach out with literature to the readers. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum Studies.
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