E-Books Come to DHS

At Wednesday's Board of Ed meeting, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton awarded grants for teachers. The mayor announced, “I raised all of this money by begging personally.”

 One of the grants was awarded to Natalie Koehler, the Danbury High School Librarian for the purchase of eight Kindles, which can download books from Amazon.com at a fraction of the cost of paperbacks or hard covers.

The Kindles will be coming at a good time since both this year and last, DHS has received absolutely no funding for their library from the school budgets. Koehler said, “We can buy six e-books for the price of a hard cover. We still would like to purchase certain books in hard cover because they last, but they are much more expensive.”

 The advent of computers has had a profound effect on student's abilities to use technology for purposes of reading for pleasure as well as research. Koehler said, “Students hardly ever do their research from hardcover encyclopedias anymore. The State provides schools with subscriptions to Grollier and other online research sources. They are hyperlinked and cross referenced and can be updated without buying new books, so it is much more cost effective.”

 Research is one thing, but with the advent of series like Harry Potter, the Twilight series and the Hunger Games, students are actually reading more fiction than before. Koehler said, “Kids appear to be voluntarily reading more.”

 That is good news for most parents who assume that students spend too much time on computers. “Our strongest plus at DHS is our fiction department. Kids enjoy reading about teen angst, but with Harry Potter and the other series, Young Adult books have become very popular. They are more relate-able, the things that happen in these books are fantasy, but there is also the sense those things could happen to anyone.”

 At the Board of Ed meeting, Dr Bill Glass commented that only two dollars a student would make a difference in the budget for books for the library. According to Koehler, no other group, including the PTO, has been contacted about raising books for the school.