E-books
Discussions reveal e-book trends
FEATURE
Siân Harris spoke about e-book trends at the E-books and E-content 2011 meeting at UCL in London in May. She reveals some of the things she and other speakers discussed there and at the recent UKSG meeting
E
-books are no longer a future topic or a niche idea but an established part of modern life. Even two years ago when consultant Laura Cox surveyed scholarly publishers as part
of a study for ALPSP, she found that 63 per cent publish e-books – an impressive percentage, particularly considering that not every publisher has books of any type in their portfolio. And there is now such a volume of e-book content that it has become a distinct category for library budgets and an important part of researcher workfl ows. In many ways, e-journals and general availability of information online over the past decade or so has created an expectation
www.researchinformation.info
for e-books – especially in reference. There are many benefi ts of e-books. Some of the particularly interesting ones for research are the ability to interact and annotate books and the instant availability. E-books are infl uencing how information
is found. Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections, told Research Information that with e-books people pop in, fi nd the information they need very quickly and then leave. Of course this might always have been the behaviour of researchers with print books but there weren’t the usage statistics to demonstrate this – and, with print, time is taken to walk between shelves and fi nd the appropriate titles, which is not required with e-books.
This raises a related issue: much more is
being studied about e-books than could ever be known about print books thanks to usage statistics. The recent MPS Librarian Survey on Usage Statistics revealed that 96.7 per cent of librarians surveyed used usage statistics and most rated statistics – especially COUNTER-compliant ones – as important or vital – although use of COUNTER-compliant statistics was lower (65.7 per cent) for e-books than for journals (86.7 per cent).
Platform integration Platform integration has been a key trend with e-books. Many publishers have offered their e-books and e-journals on the same
JUN/JUL 2011 Research Information 13
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