FEATURE


E-books Unpacking books


E-books have matured but questions remain about digital rights, access models and what a scholarly e-book really means today. Interviews by Siân Harris


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Daniel Smith, head of academic publishing, The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) e


currently have 300 books and 4,500-5,000 chapters on our e-book platform [which was launched in September 2011]. IET is not primarily a book publisher – we publish around 15-20 titles a year – but we are planning to increase our output. We are considering acquisitions as well as organic growth and have just acquired the book list of US electromagnetics engineering specialist, SciTech Publishing.


Our e-books are available as PDFs. We felt that it was not commercially viable to retrodigitise back to XML but they are searchable and, going forward, we are planning to offer fully-searchable XML. We have ideas to repackage and do more with content and are watching developments with interactivity.


16 Research Information APR/MAY 2012


Our decision to be DRM (digital rights management) free was, in a sense, a matter of principle, about facilitating access. The market regards restrictions as a barrier to use and usage will become an essential measure of value. With the advent of devices such as tablets there is a significant risk of piracy. We recognise and will try


to address it but the publishing industry will have to do something much more coherent about DRM, like the music industry is doing. There’s still not huge evidence of a downturn in hard-copy sales. Many organisations are buying both print and electronic versions, although I imagine that in time organisations with significant holdings will try to dedupe them.


Our e-books are currently on AIP’s Scitation


platform but AIP is changing its focus so we took this as an opportunity to review our requirements. It is interesting that both AIP and IET are moving to Publishing Technology’s pub2web platform. We are launching our new, full-text platform in the Summer. It will provide blended content from journals, book, conferences and other


‘The market regards restrictions as a barrier to use and usage will become an essential measure of value’


resources and allow users to purchase content in different ways. Our purpose is providing engineering information. The end user is unlikely to be very interested in whether the information is in a journal, book or whatever.


www.researchinformation.info


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