FEATURE


E-books Stephen Hawthorne, executive director, sales, marketing and strategic partnerships, Royal Society of Chemistry T


he Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has a long history as a chemical-sciences book publisher. However, it was not until 2007 that we made our first e-books available. We now publish over 1,100 e-books on the RSC Publishing platform. They are cross- searchable with our journals portfolio, and sold as subject, annual and complete collections, on a perpetual-access basis. The vast majority of our books will be made available as e-books on or before the print versions.


Following initial successes in the UK, USA and Australia as early adopters of our e-books, we have witnessed a global expansion in the


‘I believe that e-books should be available in the formats most suitable to meeting the needs of our users’


demand for e-books. Institutions from the majority of Western European countries are now accessing our e-books on a regular basis, particularly in Germany, while Singapore, India and China represent our fastest growing e-book markets. New students at these institutions are much more familiar with the concept of online and mobile access to book content and therefore we are seeing rapid usage growth


among this audience. Faculty support for RSC titles has also driven usage of e-books for research purposes.


The changes we have witnessed appear to be dependent on the level of book. While there are fewer textbooks than monographs being published, there is an expectation – particularly in the USA – that textbooks will include interactive elements (work-based learning modules). One of the major criteria in adoption consideration by faculty is homework assignments within the textbook and the availability of a solution manual and any other accompanying instructor materials. Students seem to be put off by lots of maths and equations, so this is minimised and dealt with through interactive examples and problem solving. Readers are directed to extra online material, replacing the need to include a CD or DVD. I believe that e-books should be available in


the formats most suitable to meeting the needs of our users and partners and to make the most of the interactive features enabled by online delivery. Currently our e-books are available in HTML and PDF formats but we are finalising plans to include EPUB format.


RSC supports usage of our e-book content and does not restrict institutions or users to


device or number of downloads, preferring


to include fair-use


provisions in our licence agreement with institutions.


During 2012, RSC started to partner with ebrary, EBSCO and DawsonEra to make our e-books available to institutions on a pick- and-choose basis. We witnessed an increase in demand from our customers for this model and it made sense to partner with platforms offering this service. This has appealed to those institutions that wished to order e-books from one vendor or to select individual titles to suit their course requirements. Given the level of book published at the RSC, we’ve not had much call for open-access at this stage. We offer the first chapter of each e-book on our platform for free to allow users to review the book and get a flavour of the level and writing style, and this has helped institutions judge the likely level of demand for the e-book collection. As a disruptive initiative, open-access e-books could be an interesting proposition and certainly worth further investigation. This may be appealing for first drafts or unpublished manuscripts initially. We have witnessed an increase in authors wishing to deposit their book chapters in their own institutional repository, but not yet on a wider scale.


Olaf Ernst, commercial director of IOP Publishing, which launched a new e-book programme at the Frankfurt Book Fair T


here is a huge demand for e-books. What was missing was a high-quality, major physics society publishing physics books. There was huge demand for this from the community. When I joined IOP in 2011 from Springer, I was asked many times why IOP didn’t publish e-books.


IOP sold its book programme in 2005. Nobody knew where e-books were going then and IOP’s business model was focused on print. Our new programme is different, not popular science but high-quality and high-level books. We really want to focus on authoritative content targeting researchers, like our journals. The titles aim to be must-reads within a very specific field. We also partner with Morgan & Claypool. Its e-book programme is more focused on researchers who are in the early stages of their research careers or who would like to approach a


20 Research Information APR/MAY 2013


research field more broadly and across disciplines. The programme gives authors another way to publish with us. The books will be searchable along with journal content on IOP Science. We will provide DOIs on a chapter level. We want to sell e-books as packages to institutions. We have 35 books planned by the end of 2014 and plan to grow to around 100 front list titles per year.


Our e-books will be born digital and deliver print afterwards using print on demand. Being born digital is very important. We don’t have a legacy print programme. With a print heritage you have to go with what the print looks like but with born digital it can be built differently. This could mean multimedia on top but not necessarily. It’s more about being able to think differently about things like word and page length and how you treat tables.


We will be selling to libraries, the same customers as our journals, with a perpetual- access model and no DRM. We will use full-text XML so that we can exploit all the possibilities of the internet and it gives us full flexibility to,


‘Our e-books will be born digital and deliver print afterwards’


for example, put books into EPUB. The books will also be part of our semantic enrichment programme.


So far we haven’t seen a demand for open- access books. Producing a book is very different and much more costly than a journal article. Books don’t tend to carry primary research and the business models and relationship with the author is very different.


@researchinfo www.researchinformation.info


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