E-books


In contrast, the PDA model could become open-ended unless tight controls are put in place on user acquisition. The University of Iowa, USA, for example, recently did an experiment into PDA. It set aside $25k to start the project but this budget was all used up within a couple of months. The university ended up refining its PDA plans by buying three e-book packages and adapting the trigger criteria. Nonetheless, the librarians, who spoke about this at the Charleston conference in the autumn, were positive about the benefits of PDA, pointing out how many of the most popular titles would never have been chosen by a librarian. Meanwhile, based on research into usage


of e-books in Springer’s collection at the University of Liverpool, UK, Terry Bucknell and colleagues estimated that PDA would have cost them twice as much – even though some of the books purchased in the publisher collections have never been used.


Research is so


specialised that a book could be essential to one researcher or project but completely irrelevant to the rest of the department – just like laboratory equipment or chemicals can be specific to a particular project


However, PDA has strong supporters. As


Rick Anderson, a librarian at University of Utah, USA, argued at the UKSG meeting, ‘Buying the wrong book, even if it’s at a huge discount, is still the wrong book.’ He anticipates that PDA will become the norm in libraries of the future but noted that there do need to be some controls in place. ‘There are not unlimited budgets. There do have to be some constraints,’ he explained. And this is already happening. Many PDA models have e-book purchases triggered by a certain number of accesses to the e-book or a certain length of use time – to avoid buying a book that came up in search results but turned out not to have the required information.


www.researchinformation.info


FEATURE


Currently librarians are divided on the best approach – and publishers and aggregators are seeking to meet both approaches – and it seems likely that the two will go in parallel. It’s also worth mentioning that usage


alone may not be a measure of the research value of a text. Research is so specialised that a book could be essential to one researcher or project but completely irrelevant to the rest of the department – just like laboratory equipment or chemicals can be specific to a particular project.


The cost question All of the discussion about PDA versus purchasing collections hangs on the issues of price, usage and perceived value – in other words, which gives the better use of limited libraries budgets. Often there are huge savings for buying a whole publisher collection compared with the total list price of all the titles. It’s a balance though: if prices are too


high then libraries cannot buy many books but if prices are too low then this can pose challenges for publishers – unless the volumes are high. E-book prices could pose another issue


for libraries. If researchers can find the books they want more easily through sites like Amazon – and the price is right – they may find it easier to bypass the library and simply download the books to their devices rather than searching the library catalogue to see if the title is available as an e-book and go through the authentication process to access it. However, as JISC’s Lorraine Estelle pointed out, this may not be a bad thing: after all, people have always bought their own books to some extent. A competing trend to this could also emerge


as a result of rising university tuition fees and a corresponding increase in expectations of what universities should deliver to students. Perhaps there will a trend towards preloading core e-textbooks onto students’ devices, noted Estelle. Meanwhile e-books in Europe face another


price barrier: VAT. At the E-Books and E-Content meeting librarians and publishers alike expressed frustration that electronic books are not considered the same way as their print counterparts for VAT purposes. This issue will not go away as demand for e-books continues to grow. There will be more experiments into new functionality, and one thing is certain: the concept of the book has not finished evolving.


JUN/JUL 2011 Research Information 15


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