As you may know, Pew Internet received a $1.4 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study the role of libraries in users’ lives and in their communities. So far, we’ve released reports chronicling the adoption of e-readers and tablet computers and the rise of e-reading — but we’re just getting started.

Over the course of the next two years, we’ll come out with a series of reports examining technology adoption and use in libraries, patrons’ expectations, the “library of the future,” and how libraries fit into people’s lives in all sorts of ways.

Our next report, for instance, is a look at the state of e-book borrowing in American libraries, and what sort of experiences people have when they want to check out digital content. This report will combine the quantitative results for our December 2011 nationally representative phone survey with longer responses and stories from a series of online surveys of both librarians and e-book borrowers.

How you can participate

While our phone surveys are random to ensure statistical accuracy, we are actively looking for e-book borrowers to volunteer to take our online surveys. So if you ever check out or download e-books from a public library — or if you’re a librarian at a library that has e-books available for check-out — please sign up.

Not an e-book borrower? We’d still love to hear from you. Some of our future online surveys will cover a lot of ground, so take a look to see which groups apply to you. Once you sign up (and click on the confirmation link that we send you), you’ll be notified whenever relevant online surveys are in the field.

Learn more

If you would like to learn more about where this research series is headed, a timeline of our research is available in our “About” section here.

Last updated July 2014