Jan Sanders: ASC Vestry Member & Pasadena Weekly "Cover Girl"

A 'Cloud' on the horizon
Pasadena embraces change as libraries everywhere enter the Electronic Age
By Christina Schweighofer

Jan Sanders has had her kindle for a couple of years. She likes to use it when she travels. She just finished reading Bill Bryson’s “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.”

“It’s a funny book,” Sanders said recently, sitting in her office at the west end of Pasadena’s Central Library on Walnut Street. Sanders must know a good book when she finds one. She holds the post of the library’s director.

In the United States, consumers — like Jan Sanders — are increasingly picking up Kindles and Nooks, and they are reading books on iPads and computers. Sales of e-books already outnumber those of hard covers as well as those of paperbacks. How will public libraries fare in this environment? Does the fact that Google is scanning the world’s 130 million books mean the end of libraries? Will public libraries soon be obsolete?

Sanders, who speaks with a strong, confident voice, does not hesitate when answering such questions. “I do not see the demise of public libraries because of electronic books,” she said. “We are about reading, not about the format.”

Sanders embraces digitization, believing that the e-book is the library format of the future. The statistics support Sanders’ theory. Pasadena’s libraries are seeing usage of e-books increase at a rateof 30 percent per month.

Read the rest here ... and give thanks for visionary leaders like Jan Sanders who are helping imagine both All Saints Church and the City of Pasadena into the future!