E-books Annika Bennett, eBooks & online sales manager, Taylor & Francis W
e have more than 30,000 e-books and two e-book platforms, one for HSS and one for STM. The reasons for this are historical. In the long term we may want to merge them but the subjects are very different. We sell to libraries and individuals. Libraries
have been used to buying e-books for a long time but the individual route is becoming stronger. At the end of 2011 around 15 per cent of our e-book sales were via retail channels and 85 per cent to libraries. By the end of 2012 we’d seen a shift to something like 20/80 – and library sales of e-books are still growing too.
The big retail growth has come through individual discovery and having the right devices. We have seen a move away from purchases via our platform to via big retailers. Discoverability makes a difference. We sell books we haven’t sold for a long time. Backlist digitisation is ongoing. In 2011 we digitised around 5,000 backlist titles and the same in 2012.
For 10 years we’ve had a policy of electronic and print for everything. Where we don’t digitise there may be digital rights reasons – from the
author or because of, for example, images that are included. Sometimes there is also a conscious decision not to make an electronic version and sometimes there are technical reasons. We have grown through acquisitions. For some publications, we have to digitise and some we’ve needed to redigitise. It can take a while for customers to see acquired books on our platform. Often they have different file formats,
‘It is a challenge to get the formats right and to provide a choice’
the metadata fields are different and it takes time to integrate them into different workflows. Losing rights to books is also a challenge. For example, we may not get the rights to a second edition, or a publisher we acquire may not have secured electronic rights. The authors may then not grant these to us or they may have already given these to another publisher.
It is a challenge to get the formats right and to provide a choice without overwhelming the user and you don’t want to invest large amounts of
money in making e-books in a format that a year later will be obsolete.
EPUB is establishing itself as a preferred format. However, we can’t really avoid the problem of needing to produce at least three formats – and each format requires a different ISBN.
There is also the challenge to keep them together in the system using the metadata. We want users to be able to find all the options together. Keeping this overview in the system and not clogging up your content-management system is a big challenge, especially for large publishers like us. There are vast amounts of data that need handling. We are working on more cross-content
products. For example, our South Asia Archive is an archive of primary sources, including books and journals, that was developed in cooperation with several national libraries.
The majority of the content is original, 30 per cent in local languages and 70 per cent in English. This type of resource is part of a trend moving to delivering content rather than books or journals.
Lisa Nachtigall, director, digital books sales development, Scientific, Technical, Medical and Scholarly, Wiley W
ithin the academic library environment, the availability of an e-book has improved discoverability and increased the access to valuable scholarly and research content. In the library of 1980, there was a single book on a shelf, which a student found in a card catalogue, on the premises of the library, when the library was open. Once it was checked out, that book wasn’t available to anyone else until it was checked back in. Today, that book is being used by a sometimes- unlimited number of people at any one time. It’s being found maybe in an online catalogue, maybe through a Google search, maybe through a course management tool, whenever the student decides it’s time to do some work. For researchers in the STEM community, e-books are in the lab when they need them, on their mobile devices in the field or in the hospital. And that’s just about discovery and access. Digital technology provides an opportunity to move beyond the text – to enrich the text – in ways that just aren’t available with print delivery.
www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo
At a basic level, for example, e-books allow us to include colour images within the text in ways that weren’t always available because of
production costs. But more
importantly, we can start to really focus on how ‘traditional’ content is used and then integrate tools that fundamentally change how the student or researcher engages with the content. That could include QR codes to direct students to ancillary web content, video
‘Technology can do almost anything we want. But what do our end users really need?’
to illustrate a medical technique, or author lectures to augment the text.
One of the challenges for publishers is timing. How do we manage the rate of technological change with the rate of change in reading, learning, and research preferences of the various communities we aim to support? Technology can do almost anything we might want it to
do today. But what do our end users really need and want? Do we develop enhancements because we can, or because our users will really benefit from those enhancements? We need to be sure we aren’t getting caught in the trap of doing things just because we can.
The availability of multiple proprietary e-book formats has, of course, presented a challenge for production departments to keep up with the latest technologies. We look at the opportunities provided by any new player in the e-book market to assess the benefits that a new format might offer to the end users.
DRM is a term that brings up all sorts of philosophical issues for publishers and librarians. From the publisher perspective, we understand that libraries are focused on providing access to the content that their patrons need. But publishers also have an obligation to our authors to protect their work. DRM does not have to be a bad thing; We could all be working together to create a better DRM experience for users.
APR/MAY 2013 Research Information 19
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