For my teaching job, I recently got to borrow an iPad. Woo-hoo! No one was more excited than my 11-year-old daughter, Gigi. She immediately downloaded the Amazon app and searched for the bestselling teen books. For a mere 99 cents, she could buy Switched, the first e-title in Amanda Hocking’s Trylle Trilogy. Gigi had never heard of the story or the author – but the price was right. I said OK.

Gigi loved curling up in her room with the brightly lit iPad. Quickly, she got caught up in the story of Trylle heroine Wendy, her queen mother, and her evil father. In just a few days, she plowed through book #1.

She asked if she could spend $2.99 on Torn, the e-version of the second title in the trilogy. Sure.

Meanwhile, the new academic quarter was starting, and I had to turn the iPad over to my students.

With Gigi’s permission, I headed to a local library in hopes of checking out the print version of Ascend, the third title in the trilogy. No dice. Like books #1 and #2, #3 does not exist at the library in any form – electronic or print. (The first two books are available for Amazon customers to buy in paperback, but the third book is not.)

Was the librarian – who had never heard of Hocking or the Trylle Trilogy — sure I couldn’t get any of the titles? She told me that the series must just be an “e-phenomenon.”

But what about my eager young reader, who just wants the local libraries (we go to several) to keep up with her reading habits and interests?

Libraries are trying, and it’s tough to keep up. My own town’s library offers 2,349 children’s audio and e-titles, including some favorite picture books (such as the Berenstain Bears and P.D. Eastman), middle-grade stories (the Percy Jackson series), and YA novels (such as Twilight and Ally Condie’s Matched). Yay! But it’s missing many, too. That’s partly because some big publishers, such as Macmillan, Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster, aren’t yet in the library market. (So forget trying to check out a library e-book of the Hunger Games trilogy.)

And vendor OverDrive, which manages e-book lending for most public libraries, only this week announced that Amazon was finally working with it to make thousands of titles available through its more than 11,000 public library partners. So there’s hope for Gigi the next time she wants to check out an e-bookstore hit at the library.

Still, to better reach the e-teen and e-tween, print-oriented librarians will need to become more savvy about e-only hits. (Gigi’s advice: “Get top sellers.”)

The night before I brought the iPad to my students, Gigi rallied and did a power read of book #3, which she downloaded for $2.99. She knew she didn’t really want to read a tiny-print version of the book on my iPhone – her only other alternative. Not an option: skipping book #3. “If there are cliffhangers, you want to know what happens,” she says.

Gigi sees many downsides to e-only books. She can’t pass them along, the way she could with the Clique series. And besides, e-reader ownership among her sixth-grade peers is tiny: three kids with a Kindle, one with a Nook, and no one with an iPad, she says. (Only five percent of teens say they read e-books frequently, according to a recent Bowker/PubTrack and Association of Booksellers for Children study.

Note to Hocking: Come out with a print version of book #3 ASAP – and push your e-versions to librarians everywhere. Note to librarians: Look at the bestseller list on Amazon. And stock the e-shelves accordingly.

Springen, a journalist, recently wrote a feature for Publishers Weekly called Reaching the E-Teen.