FEATURE
E-books Ken Breen, senior director of e-book products, and Scott Wasinger, senior director of e-book sales, EBSCO W
e offer e-books on the same platform as EBSCOhost. Allowing customers to search their journal-based databases along with their e-books promotes usage and value of the libraries collections – and provides a fuller experience for users. We are approaching 300,000 scholarly e-books in our collection. We make these available at the list price assigned by each publisher. A challenge EBSCO inherited was the one-time markup that was placed on each e-book by NetLibrary. We learned from our customers that this fee was a barrier to entry to our platform. In February, we eliminated the markup. Today, e-books on EBSCOhost have no markup and no fees whatsoever. It has traditionally been a one-user purchase
model for e-books. But there are many other approaches and options that can be utilised, and we expect to see some shifts. We anticipate customers will take advantage of the combination of simple purchase/ownership options (one user, three users, unlimited users), patron-driven acquisition (ownership now; lease and upgrade coming soon), as well as
Kari Paulson, president, EBL W
e have seen a real change in the size of budgets allocated to e-books. It shows a real mindset shift in librarians. We also see more of e-preferred approach in the more advanced libraries and a massive boom in requests from school libraries.
Libraries’ understanding of different functionalities of e-books has improved a lot. There has been a rapid adoption of patron- driven acquisition (PDA). We have been working with PDA since 2005 but then it was really only for early adopters. Now virtually every library asks about PDA. And libraries who use PDA generally spend more on e-books because it enables them to really see how the books are used. We hear of push back from big deals with e-books and see a mix of packages from publishers, mixing and merging different acquisition models. Some libraries want to deal with one company, rather than many different publishers but others like to go to publishers directly. We are not competition to publishers but a supplementary channel to market. I don’t think much has changed in discussion
18 Research Information APR/MAY 2012
of DRM. It has become confused where some publishers have said they will have no DRM but others have it. There are real reasons for publishers to have DRM, especially on platforms that aren’t their own, because there are different liabilities if e-books are copied from aggregators’ sites.
It is really important that users know what to expect so we’ve standardised the DRM across our platform. We tried to think what would be
‘Libraries’ understanding of different functionalities of e-books has improved greatly’
acceptable for print books and applied a fair-use mentality. When publishers sign with us they all sign up to the same conditions in terms of printing, copying and downloading. When it comes to access, the more walls we put up and the more we get in the way of access the more we push users to other places. I’m not sure that the single-user model is really effective. You turn people away so you lose the ability to gauge real use and demand for content. And the
single-user model really goes against people’s expectations of online from their experiences with e-journals and resources such as Wikipedia. On the other hand, unlimited access is problematic. It means a publisher will never sell another copy of that book to that library so the publisher could set really high prices. We wanted to find an access model that was more flexible but still fair. With our platform, we set a limit of 325 downloads before libraries need to buy a second copy. Publishers can set the price. When any library hits that number they are always happy to purchase a second copy. The percentage of titles that reach that level of downloads is still quite low. Many print monographs are hardly used at all so just because something is an e-book doesn’t mean it’s going to get tonnes of use. We’ve been seeing more requests for EPUB and we have been supplying it at EBL for about a year. I think there are some really interesting opportunities with EPUB 3. We’re working on technology to take advantage of it so when we start to get more content in this format from publishers we can offer it.
www.researchinformation.info
annual subscription to a collection of e-books. Adobe Content Server using Adobe Digital Editions has been the standard for applying e-book DRM. We believe there will be more ideal approaches to DRM to streamline the user experience and provide more value to libraries in the not-too-distant future. And where some publishers might choose a more relaxed level of DRM for their content, we apply that variability to our product in order to provide the most optimal end user experience. There has also been a shift towards libraries leveraging a combination of purchase models and approaches to collection development. We anticipate that an approach we are calling
‘Allowing customers to search journal-based databases along with e-books promotes usage and value of the library’s collections and provides a fuller experience for users’
Ken Breen
Scott Wasinger
“Smart PDA”, will generate the next shift. The idea with patron-driven acquisition (PDA) is that only actual usage of an e-book triggers a purchase. The idea with Smart PDA is to combine the availability of usage-driven purchase with the notion that a user will never wait for a book because a library owns only one copy. Instead, the notion is to allow the libraries to upgrade to a multi-user model when needed (first copy of a book is in use). Our sense is that e-books will trend in the same way as e-journals. But there is a place for print. While some books will be published e-first or e-only, print books are not likely to go away completely.
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