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The Open eBooks Forum (OeBF) conference on eBooks in the public libraries held yesterday in New York City was one of those events where you can feel the surge of a movement beginning to realize its true strength in real-time. After several years of false starts, eBooks are starting to take hold in public libraries and are now providing library patrons in numerous major cities growing access to electronic materials. Numerous success stories at the conference pointed to rationalizing technologies, improving availability of content and an economic environment that has forced libraries to find more cost-effective methods of servicing patrons as leading factors in eBooks lending growth. Will this be the breakout year for eBooks? Probably not, as balky rights managment, entrenched library staffs and antiquated cataloging systems still pose significant challenges to a complete eBooks takeover any time soon. But where some see a continuing evolution of eBooks it's clear that this is a quiet revolution in the making, with irresistable forces beginning to compel libraries to embrace eBooks far more rapidly than may have been imagined. Not the least of the pressure for change is coming from the publishing industry, which looks to the strengthening success of rights-protected eBooks in libraries as a test bed for experimenting with new ways of deploying and monetizing premium content in models that can help them to define profits between the trusty but aging "one book, one user" model and the melee of open Web access. Community libraries offer publishers an environment in which they can work within a comfortably familiar distribution model to work out the details of how eBooks and other premium rights-protected content can best serve users. And then? The unmentioned factor at the conference was the Web itself, where eBooks already enjoy healthy sales. Content ecommerce portals could easily extend current commercial models to include lending and other mixed-use models that could tie into local library cards, corporate IDs or other forms of access subsidization. Just as corporate librarians were caught in the downdraft of technological and economic change that rendered many of them redundant, public and institutional librarians feeling the pinch of budgets and patrons going "Web first" for answers may find the publishers whose revenues depend on them finding the answers not hesitating to get content to their patrons by any means necessary if libraries fail to get their products to their markets in a manner that will sustain their profits. The power of local communities as a component of the Web's strength is likely to keep public libraries in the mix for a long time, but competition for servicing their patrons without their services will only increase unless they decide to go from evolution to revolution fairly soon.