Tag: ebooks

ER&L 2016: Hard Data for Tough Choices: eBooks and pBooks in Academic Libraries

ebooks
“ebooks” by Randy Rodgers

Speakers: Katherine Leach and Matthew Connor Sullivan, Harvard

eBooks have not supplanted pBooks. Providing access to both formats is not possible…even for Harvard.

Users really do want and use both. There is a need for a better understanding of user behavior for both formats.

In 2014, they purchased the complete Project Muse collection, which included a significant and intentional overlap with their print collection. This allowed for a deep comparison and analysis.

You cannot compare them directly in a meaningful way. There are many ways of counting eBooks and pBooks are notoriously undercounted in their use. They looked at whether or not a book was used, and if it was used in only one format or multiple, and then how that compared to the average use across the collection.

26% of titles were used in both formats over the time period, only .5% on a monthly basis. It’s sometimes suggested that eBooks are used for discovery, but even at the monthly level this is not reflected in the data. The pattern of use of each format is generally about the same over the semester, but eBook use tends to be a little behind the pBook use. But, again, it’s difficult to get precise patterns of eBook use with monthly reports. There was no significant differences in format use by subject classification or imprint year or publisher, particularly when factoring the number of titles in each category.

They looked at the average decrease of a pBook over a four year period. They found a 35% decrease in circulation for each imprint year over that time, and this is without any impact of eBook. This is not always factored into these kinds of studies. They found that the decrease increases to 54% when eBooks are added to the mix. There’s also the issue of print use decreasing generally, with monographs losing out to eresources in student and faculty citation studies.

HSS at Harvard has been very clear that they want to continue the print collection at the level it has been, but they also want electronic access. How do we work with publishers to advocate for electronic access without having to purchase the book twice?

Audience Q&A:
What about providing short term loan access for the first 3-4 years? Harvard doesn’t like to purchase eBooks they don’t have perpetual access to.

P&E has been available for journals, why not books? Some publishers have worked with them to give deep discounts on print with an eBook package.

What has been the impact of electronic reserves on use? Haven’t looked at it.

How do you know if someone looked at the eBook and determined they didn’t want/need and that is why the pBook wasn’t used? Hard to determine. They don’t use eBook usage to drive the print acquisition — usually they already have the pBook.

Considering the lifecycle and the decrease in use over a short period of time from imprint year, does that cause you to question the purchase of eBook backfiles? eBook use over that time didn’t seem to decrease as significantly as the pBook.

ER&L 2016: Agents of Change: The Ongoing Challenges of Managing E-books and Streaming Media

change
“change” by samantha celera

Presenters: Steven R. Harris and Molly Beisler, University of Nevada, Reno

Evolution doesn’t happen in slow increments. Moments of punctuations happen quite suddenly. Ebooks are kind of like that in the evolution of the book.

In 2005, they were putting all formats on one record, manually updating the electronic content. As the quantity of ebooks increased, and the various licensing terms expanded, they were struggling to maintain this. In 2008, they began batch loading large numbers of eresources materials, with one person maintaining QA and merging records.

Then discovery services came in like an asteroid during the dinosaur age. They finally shifted from single record to separate records. They began tracking/coding ebooks to distinguish DDA from purchased, and expanded the ERM to track SU and other terms. This also prompted another staff reorganization.

They developed workflows via Sharepoint for new eresources depending on what the thing was: subscriptions/standing orders, one-time purchases with annual fees, and one-time purchases without annual fees. The streaming video packages fit okay in this workflow.

Streaming media has more complex access and troubleshooting issues. Platform as are variable, plugins may not be compatible. There are also many different access models (DDA, EBA) and many come with short-term licenses. Feel like the organization structure can support them as they figure out how to manage these.

They use a LibAnswers queue to track the various eresources problems come up.

Reiteration of the current library technology climate for eresources, with various challenges. No solutions.

The future comes with new problems due to next-gen ILS and their workflow quirks. With the industry consolidation, will everybody’s products work well with each other or will it become like the Amazon device ecosystem? Changing acquisitions models are challenges for collection development.

Be flexible. Do change. Agents.

Charleston 2014 – Evidence-Based eBook Purchasing: Results and Implications from a Consortia-Publisher Initiative

Speaker: Julia Gelfand, University of California Irvine

They had purchased the CRC ebooks from 2002-2012, but couldn’t continue due to financial constraints. They reviewed their priorities and options for cost sharing and access.

In 2013, they opted to go with 6 collections at the lower tier of access shared across a subset of campuses. In 2014, they opted to go an evidence-based DDA route in EngNetBase.

All new titles were added as they were released, and after the second use, in general it was acquired system-wide.

Campuses that had discovery systems added the titles, but there was no other deep indexing of the content.

The total spend was less than the cost of the package, but still generous and fit about what they expected on a title-by-title cost.

 

Speaker: Susan Sanders, Taylor & Francis

The publisher provided MARC records and usage data, and there was an agreed-upon spend but no deposit. They had trouble generating statistics for this collection specifically, both on a consortia level and at an institutional level.

One adjustment they needed to make was to extend access beyond the calendar year because 4th quarter titles didn’t have much time to be discovered.

Charleston 2014 – How Does Ebook Adoption Vary By Discipline? What Humanists, Social Scientists and Scientists Say They Want (A LibValue Study)

ebook
“ebook” by Daniel Sancho

Speakers: Tina Chrzastowski, Santa Clara University; Lynn Wiley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ebook use in their survey follows the definition of COUNTER BR2. They cannot get all ebook publishers to provide that data, and not all of the ones that provide the data uses COUNTER.

They saw a spike in use in FY14. Two things happened: ebooks get used more over time, and they’ve got 8 years of data now. And, they implemented Primo. Discovery has a huge impact on ebook use.

UIUC science faculty love ebooks. They didn’t do a DDA program for them because they already buy just about everything.

It was easier to buy non-science ebooks in packages, though this caused complications with trying to figure out the funding from many different pots. They would prefer to buy new ebook content title-by-title.

They used eBrary with a mix of STL and DDA. After the third STL at 10-15% of list price, they purchased the ebook. This meant they didn’t buy everything that was used, but they ended up spending much less over-all as a result.

They loaded the records, including those they already owned in print. They were alerted of any STL use. Purchased titles were also checked to see if there was other availability such as the print copy. They do book delivery for faculty, so they were interested in which version would be used when both are fairly easy and fast.

There was a lot of good use across the disciplines, but relatively small numbers of titles were used enough to trigger the purchase (more than 3 STLs). These were all multi-user titles, so for each STL triggered, many people could use it during that 24 hour period. On average, there were around 4-5 user sessions per title for both the Humanities and Social Science pilots.

For the Social Sciences, they found that 67% of the STLs were owned in print, with 73% of them available to be requested if the user wanted that format. For the Humanities, 80% were owned in print and 71% of those titles were available.

Based on the metrics from eBrary, they could make some conclusions about what the users were doing in that content. “Quick dips” were less than 9 pages looked at, printed, copied, and no downloads. “Low” was 10-25 pages viewed, printed, etc. and no downloads. “Moderate” 26-45 pages used with a chaper download. “High” up to 299 pages and chapter downloads. “Deep” significant views or whole-book download. They might want to combine deep and high.

In the social sciences, 80% of the use came from quick and low, with no real deep reading. In the humanities, about 46% of the use came from quick and low, with the remaining coming from moderate and high use, and two books fell into the deep category.

They followed up the DDA program with surveys of the faculty and graduate students for the books triggered in the program. They used SurveyMonkey and gift cards for incentives.

They had questions about the perceptions of ebooks, and used skip logic to direct them to specific books in their discipline to use and then respond to questions about that book. It took about 20 minutes to complete. Around 15% of the Humanities responded and 25% of the Social Sciences responded.

They included a question about ejournals to put them in the frame of mind of other electronic things they use. Given the options for book formats, though, they found that most of the respondents would prefer to use mostly print with sometimes ebook.

Every discipline expects that they would be able to download most or all of an ebook, and that the ebook will always be accessible and available (translating to unlimited simultaneous users, no DRM, etc.).

The humanities haven’t quite reached the tipping point of the shift towards ebook use, but the social sciences think that in 5 years, most of their monographic use will be electronic.

Availability and accessibility is the tipping point for chosing a preferred format. If the print book is unavailable, then they are most likely to use the ebook than ask the library to buy another copy or borrow another copy.

In the end, though, it’s still just a “big ol’ hassle” to work with ebooks compared to how we’re used to using books. For many, the note-taking ability or the technology to better use the ebooks were a hinderance.

What do all disciplines want? More ebooks, more current ebook titles, fewer restrictions on copying and printing.

Image reproduction and copyright are big issues — ebooks need all the content that is in the print book. People want consistency between platforms.

We’re still in the early evolution of ebooks. Many changes are yet to come, including copyright changes, tablet and reader evolution, platform consolidation, and things we have not yet thought of.

Readers and scholars are ready for the ebook revolution. How will the library respond?

three weeks later – take-aways from ER&L 2014

Twitter glitter #erl14

With barely a half a day to catch my breath, I jumped from ER&L into the complexities of gender issues in the workplace where libraries and technology intersect via the LTG Summit. As a result, it’s taken me some time to go back over my notes from ER&L and pull out the things that are most poignant, or themes that kept resurfacing.

ebooks
Ebooks in a library setting are still pretty much a pain in the ass. Some sources are doing better about DRM and functionality, but the aggregators are still offering less than optimal solutions. Let’s not even mention ILL rights.

One thing that really struck me was how we all keep thinking the Sciences will be all over this ebook thing, since they took to ejournals like white on rice. However, we’ve managed to forget that the Sciences weren’t all that into print books compared to their love affair with print journals, so that’s not going to change much in the shift in format.

On the other hand, Social Sciences are gravitating towards ebooks pretty well. They’re more willing than the other disciplines to use the relatively crappy versions on aggregator platforms, per some research being done on eBrary and EBL usage over the past few years.

workflows
We’re still trying to figure out how to incorporate the quirks of eresources into our workflow models that were developed in the offline age of print. Division by format works only if the formats remain divided, but print and electronic comes bundled often, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s a book or a serial.

Larger institutions are doing a lot of work on reorganizing and retraining, some better than others. I’m still not sure how to handle this in my Acquisitions team of four, with Cataloging in a different division. Communication seems to be key, along with acting as a telephone switch, redirecting requests to the proper individual.

ER&L 2014 — Diving Into Ebook Usage: Navigating the Swell of Information

“Two boys jumping & diving” by Xosé Castro Roig

Speakers: Michael Levine-Clark (University of Denver) & Kari Paulson (ProQuest eBrary/EBL)

ProQuest is looking at usage data across the eBrary and EBL platforms as they are working to merge them together. To help interpret the data, they asked Levine-Clark to look at it as well. This is more of a proof-of-concept than a final conclusion.

They looked at 750,000 ebooks initially, narrowing it down for some aspects. He asked several questions, from the importance of quality to disciplinary preferences to best practices for measuring use, and various tangential questions related to these.

They looked at eBrary data from 2010-2013Q3 and EBL data from 2011-2013Q3. They used only the titles with an LC call number, and separate analysis of those titles that come from university presses specifically.

Usage was defined in three ways: sessions, views (count of page views), and downloads (entire book). Due to the variations in the data sets (number of years, number of customers, platforms), they could not easily compare the usage information between eBrary and EBL.

Do higher quality ebooks get used more? He used university press books as a measure of quality, though he recognizes this is not the best measure. For titles with at least one session, he found that the rate of use was fairly comparable, but slightly higher for university press books. The session counts and page views in eBrary was significantly higher for UP books, but not as much with EBL. In fact, consistently use was higher for UP books across the categories, but this may be because there are more UP books selected by libraries, thus increasing their availability.

What does usage look like across broad disciplines? Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM were broken out and grouped by their call number ranges. He excluded A & Z (general) as well as G (too interdisciplinary) out of the equation. The social sciences were the highest in sessions and views on eBrary, but humanities win the downloads. For EBL, the social sciences win all categories. When he looked at actions per session, STEM had higher views, but all downloaded at about the same rate on both platforms.

How do you measure predicted use? He used the percentage of books in an LC class relative to the total books available. If the percentage of a use metric is lower then it is not meeting expected use, and vice versa. H, L, G, N, and D were all better than expected. Q, F, P, K and U were worse than expected.

How about breadth versus depth? This gets complicated. Better to find the slides and look at the graphs. The results map well to the predicted use outcomes.

Can we determine the level of immersion in a book? If more pages are viewed per session in a subject area, does that mean the users spend more time reading or just look at more pages? Medicine (R), History of the Americas (F), and Technology (T) appear to be used at a much higher rate within a session than other areas, despite performing poorly in breadth versus depth assessment. In other words, they may not be used much per title, but each session is longer and involves more actions than others.

How do we use these observations to build better collections and better serve our users?

Books with call numbers tend to be use more than those without. Is it because a call number is indicative of better metadata? Is it because publishers of better quality will provide better metadata? It’s hard to tell at this point, but it’s something he wants to look into.

A white paper is coming soon and will include a combined data set. It will also include the EBL data about how long someone was in a book in a session. Going forward, he will also look into LC subclasses.

ER&L 2013: Ebooks — Their Use and Acceptance by Undergraduates and Faculty

“Kali, Avatar of the eBook” by Javier Candeira

Speaker: Deborah Lenares, Wellesley College

Libraries have been relatively quietly collecting ebooks for years, but it wasn’t until the Kindle came out that public interest in ebooks was aroused. Users exposure and expectations for ebooks has been raised, with notable impact on academic libraries. From 2010-2011, the number of ebooks in academic libraries doubled.

Wellesley is platform agnostic — they look for the best deal with the best content. Locally, they have seen an overall increase in unique titles viewed, a dramatic increase in pages viewed, a modest decrease in pages printed, and a dramatic increase in downloads.

In February 2012, they sent a survey to all of their users, with incentives (iPad, gift cards, etc.) and a platform (Zoomerang) provided by Springer. They had a 57% response rate (likely iPad-influenced), and 71% have used ebooks (51% used ebooks from the Wellesley College Library). If the survey respondent had not used ebooks, they were skipped to the end of the survey, because they were only interested in data from those who have used ebooks.

A high percent of the non-library ebooks were from free sources like Google Books, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, etc. Most of the respondents ranked search within the text and offline reading or download to device among the most important functionality aspects, even higher than printing.

Most of the faculty respondents found ebooks to be an acceptable option, but prefer to use print. Fewer students found ebooks an acceptable option, and preferred print more than faculty. There is a reason that will be aparent later in the talk.

The sciences preferred ebooks more than other areas, and found them generally more acceptable than other areas, but the difference is slight. Nearly all faculty who used ebooks would continue to, ranging from preferring them to reluctant acceptance.

Whether they love or hate ebooks, most users skimmed/search and read a small number of consecutive pages or a full chapter. However, ebooks haters almost never read an entire book, and most of the others infrequently did so. Nearly everyone read ebooks on a computer/laptop. Ebook lovers used devices, and ebook haters were more likely to have printed it out. Most would prefer to not use their computer/laptop, and the ebook lovers would rather use their devices.

Faculty are more likely to own or plan to purchase a device than students, which may be why faculty find ebooks more acceptable than students. Maybe providing devices to them would be helpful?

For further research:

  • How does the robustness of ebook collections effect use and attitudes?
  • Is there a correlation between tablet/device use and attitudes?
  • Are attitudes toward shared ebooks (library) different from attitudes toward personal ebooks?

The full text of the white paper is available from Springer.

ER&L 2013: E or P — A Comparative Analysis of Electronic and Print Book Usage

“Book & Phone Book” by Lynn Gardner

Speakers: Michael Levine-Clark & Christopher C. Brown, University of Denver

If someone checks out a physical book, do you know if they really read it? If someone accesses an ebook, do you know if they really read it? If a faculty member has a print book checked out for a year, is it more valuable to them than an ebook they access several times?

Sometimes, the title format in the catalog record can influence what is found and used. Vendor records can sometimes have series names in the beginning of the title, which the cataloger would not do with print.

ISBNs don’t match/merge easily. His solution was to remove the check digit and the prefix, and match on the “ISBN 9”. This works, mostly, but another solution was needed. Ended up having to do a lot of matching to pull together useful comparison of circulation and download data to compare e versus p use.

They found that when both formats were available, a little over half of the print books were used, and less than half of the ebooks were used. Of the titles used in both formats, there was higher use all around. The lowest level of use came from ebooks where the print was not checked out at all.

Use of electronic books may lead to print, but use of print doesn’t seem to lead to electronic. It may be that if dual format is higher it may be that good books get used no matter what format they are in. It may also be that e-discovery drives p-use.

Future considerations: the role of discovery and the role of ILL in a demand for print when electronic is available.

Charleston 2012: Ebooks – One Size Does Not Fit All

One size fits all. Welcome to the 80's by Stephan van Es
“One size fits all. Welcome to the 80’s” by Stephan van Es

Speaker: Anne McKee, GWLA

SERU was heavily involved in putting this session together. SERU hopes to put away with the madness of licensing and come up with mutually agreeable terms.

Most libraries purchase ebooks in order to make them available 24/7 to their users. While they haven’t grown to proportion sizes larger than print in library collections, they are heading there.

Researchers like ebooks because they don’t have to return them, and are more accessible than print books in the developing world. Students appreciate the ease of accessibility, particularly distance learnings, but given the choice they would take print over e every time. Libraries like them because there are easier/better ways of assessing usage and value to their users, but there are licensing and DRM headaches.

Speaker: Adam Chesler, Business Expert Press / Momentum Press

He has worked for large publishers, but now works for a small, new publisher.

What’s hard for a new publisher to break into the library market? Creating awareness, providing value — acquisition librarians are already overwhelmed with sales pitches via email. Authors may be wary of working with an unknown outlet when there are so many other options. They have to figure out ways to do this creatively.

Gaining budget shares in library materials budgets is challenging, where established publishers have long-standing space. Setting up trials for libraries and following up on them is challenging when one person is responsible for every business/science library in North America. “If you set up a trial, it would be much better to tell me to go to hell than ignore me.”

What’s easy? Nothing.

Well, being an e-only publisher means they don’t have responsibility for a print legacy that needs to be converted to online. That’s easy. They also have more freedom to experiment, particularly with pricing models. And SERU. That’s easy. They also don’t have their own platform, so they make the books available on established providers libraries are already comfortable using.

Speaker: Kimberly Steinle, Duke University Press

When they created the ebook side of the press, they modeled it after the ejournal side, with similar tiered pricing. They also work with the other ebook platforms and their pricing and licensing models.

While the ejournal collection sales are significant, they were surprised to find that ebook collections were not as popular as individual title sales.

They thought selling ebooks would be easy, since they already had existing relationships. MARC records, pricing, technology — not as easy as they thought. Squeezing the ebook model into the ejournal model doesn’t quite fit.

It’s easy to set up multiple sales models, but harder to get information about who the customers are and using that to make business decisions.

They’re a little worried that if they give up DRM it will impact print sales, but it’s obviously pretty unpopular and they do want the books to be used. They’re thinking about future formats — EPUB3, HTML5 — they need to keep up. They’re thinking about new ways to sell the content, and increasing the number of platforms and partners they work with.

Speaker: Bob Boissey, Springer

Serials come first at Springer (because they’re 80% of your materials budget). But, he’ll talk about ebooks today.

The STM publisher’s preference is to sell ebooks in packages directly to libraries, but there are other models based on library or patron selection that have some appeal. Eventually, market forces will probably mean they’ll have to do something with PDA.

In the post-PDA world, maybe we stop selecting and make sure that our systems are solid for allowing our users to find the best, most relevant content in an un-scoped collection. Might also mean giving up some of our concepts about what librarianship is.

The easy stuff: Libraries are the traditional purchasers of scholarly books, and publishers know how many print books we’ve purchased from them in the past. Many eresource issues were resolved with ejournals. SERU. The volume discount approach to selling ebook packages can work if the per unit cost is low, the percentage of portfolio used is high, and the spend is commensurate with print spend, but with more titles. Include textbooks and reference books in the package. Remove DRM, pair with liberal use and ILL permissions.

The not so easy, but not so hard stuff: Editors and authors have not had an easy time coming to terms with ebooks, much like print on demand. Discovery layer for ebooks is still the catalog, and it’s not down to the full text quite yet. Tablets are great for ebooks, and as they get more popular on campuses, ebooks get used more. Might have to give up the concept of book as a full thing and be okay with chapter-level reading. Most scholarly books outside of the humanities and social sciences are not read as a whole.

Charleston 2012: Curating a New World of Publishing

Looking through spy glass by Arild Nybø
“Looking through spy glass” by Arild Nybø

Hypothesis: Rapid publishing output and a wide disparity of publishing sources and formats has made finding the right content at the right time harder for librarians.

Speaker: Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords

Old model of publishing was based on scarcity, with publishers as mediators for everything. Publishers aren’t in the business of publishing books, they are in the business of selling books, so they really focus more on what books they think readers want to read. Ebook self publishing overcomes many of the limitations of traditional publishing.

Users want flexibility. Authors want readers. Libraries want books accessible to anyone, and they deliver readership.

The tools for self publishing are now free and available to anyone around the world. The printing press is now in the cloud. Smashwords will release about 100,000 new books in 2012, and they are hitting best seller lists at major retailers and the New York Times.

How do you curate this flood? Get involved at the beginning. Libraries need to also promote a culture of authorship. Connect local writers with local readers. Give users the option to publish to the library. Emulate the best practices of the major retailers. Readers are the new curators, not publishers.

Smashwords Library Direct is a new service they are offering.

Speaker: Eric Hellman, from Unglue.it

[Missed the first part as I sought a more comfortable seat.]

They look for zero margin distribution solutions by connecting publishers and libraries. They do it by running crowd-funded pledge drive for every book offer, much like Kickstarter. They’ve been around since May 2012.

For example, Oral Literature in Africa was published by Oxford UP in 1970, and it’s now out of print with the rights reverted to the author. The rights holder set a target amount needed to make the ebook available free to anyone. The successful book is published with a Creative Commons license and made available to anyone via archive.org.

Unglue.it verifies that the rights holder really has the rights and that they can create an ebook. The rights holder retains copyright, and the ebook format is neutral. Books are distributed globally, and distribution rights are not restricted to anyone. No DRM is allowed, so the library ebook vendors are having trouble adopting these books.

This is going to take a lot of work to make it happen, if we just sit and watch it won’t. Get involved.

Speaker: Rush Miller, library director at University of Pittsburgh

Why would a library want to become a publisher? It incentivizes the open access model. It provides services that scholars need and value. It builds collaborations with partners around the world. It improves efficiencies and encourages innovation in scholarly communications.

Began by collaborating with the university press, but it focuses more on books and monographs than journals. The library manages several self-archiving repositories, and they got into journal publishing because the OJS platform looked like something they could handle.

They targeted diminishing circulation journals that the university was already invested in (authors, researchers, etc.) and helped them get online to increase their circulation. They did not charge the editors/publishers of the journals to do it, and encouraged them to move to open access.

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