E-books
Steven Cawley (SC), solutions marketing manager for e-books for Science Direct, and Leo de Vos (LV), director of pricing, academic and government products, Elsevier
SC: We have been carrying out customer research into e-books over the past six months. The key trend that we see is that customers are looking for fl exibility and choice. The traditional model for acquiring print
books does not sit well with e-books. In the print world, publishers send books for libraries to look at and they return them if they don’t want to buy them. There is some sense of test driving and shared risk between libraries and publishers. We need to develop models to inform libraries and help with acquisition. E-book usage behaviour allows libraries to see that they are getting return on investment. LV: Unlike journals, books are not centrally purchased or bulk-purchased. That is the heritage of print, and it makes the whole penetration of e-books much slower than for e-journals. In the sales process we can advise what is
relevant to a particular institution. We have a large amount of usage data on journals so we can see, for example, what subject areas the institution is interested in. We have a sales force on the ground that is in contact with customers on a regular basis.
‘Libraries want to be able to offer unlimited, simultaneous access’
SC: Another key trend is that users are looking for fair usage of e-books and libraries want to be able to offer unlimited, simultaneous access. We like that our content is being used and we don’t want to restrict how they do this. People do not want temporary, subscription-based access to e-books, except with rapidly-changing content like e-reference.
Creating e-books gives us the opportunity
to build a critical mass of content in XML format that can then be used in different ways, such as in a lab environment. Multimedia opportunities with e-books are certainly appreciated with e-reference too. LV: We have a very extreme example of this with our Brain Navigator product. This was once a book and is now a three-dimensional electronic resource that links to the e-book and journal content. A lot of things will move this way. It
enables things that weren’t possible in the print world. SC: I think we are going to see interesting and exciting developments in e-books. Our product development teams are tracking developments with new devices. It is a continual learning process for publishers, libraries and end-users. We are still discovering what the best way forward is with e-books.
Jude Norris, e-book sales and marketing manager, Dawson Books
Dawson is primarily a book seller and over the past 10 years we recognised the need for e-books within our offer. Our e-book
platform, dawsonera, launched in 2007 and there are now about 130,000 e-books on the platform. Our main customer base is academic libraries. We are particularly strong in the UK and Scandinavia, but have expanded signifi cantly since the advent of e-books. Many publishers have reassessed their
models recently. They often used to have embargo periods so that, for example, aggregators could not have e-books until six months after the print book came out. That has really changed now. We sell e-books at the publishers’ list
prices. Each year libraries receive 400 credits to use a book they purchase. These credits are renewed annually for no extra cost and they
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own the e-book in perpetuity. This enables them to meet the peaks and troughs during the year. Effectively, a library could purchase an e-book and have 400 concurrent users either reading online or offl ine at any one time. Libraries can simply purchase a second ‘copy’ of the e-book if they want more use. There is very robust DRM in our system
and users can do things such as print and copy e-book content. With this model we have tried to make everything as simple as possible. It is the same across the platform, and the conditions are the same for all the e-books we sell. We have simple access management that
exploits the benefi ts of a single system. We work with Athens and the UK Access Management Federation in the UK, Haka in Finland, Switch in Switzerland, Feide in Norway, Renater in France and DFN in Germany, for example. We’ve been working with content discovery
and federated search products too. These include Summons from Serial Solutions and
the Ex Libris tools SFX, Metalib and Primo. We want to have as many front doors to e-books as possible. Often e-resources are hidden under the surface in libraries. We see a real mix of formats. Many publishers send us PDFs, but we are seeing a growth of ePub. Publishers are now understanding the need for content in the best ways possible. E-book readers haven’t taken off as expected. The feedback that we get from librarians is that students are not really interested in e-book readers. They already have their phones and laptops so don’t want to carry another device. Our dawsonera platform already works with the iPhone. Because of the number of competitors
in the market place there have been many e-book initiatives. Initially libraries wanted one platform for their e-books, but they have found that students don’t mind where their content is. Content is going to become more bite-sized too. We are now starting to sell individual chapters.
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