I was helping someone check about new local books and I was going through the library catalogue to see which were in stock and which needed ordering. I came across one title which wasn’t held so was just putting the details for ordering when I noticed that it was a Kindle only book. On further investigation I realized that it was a republication of a book first written 30 years ago, with a slightly different title, and since it was already in stock it was fine in this instance and we didn’t need this edition. It did make me wonder if anyone had come a situation where a useful local studies title was only available in e-book format and what did you do about it?
e-books & local studies
CILIP Local Studies Group 
When at Slough we digitised the ‘bible’ of Slough history – by Maxwell Fraser. Most of the work was tracking down the copyright and attaching the indexed terms to chapter pdfs.
It is also amazing how many books have been digitised. I’ve downloaded catalogues and older e-books that are free of charge online and then am able to do free-text searches – it has been a godsend.