FEATURE
E-books Colin Caveney, sales director, Semantico E
-books were always viewed as something you get as a whole. There is still a lot of talk about digitising and monetising print books. Publishers carry behind them hundreds of years of an established market. People know what a book is – but this has obvious limitations. Publishers should be able to sell by chapter but not all are set up for this – and people don’t want to buy a physical book this way. Selling e-books by chapter adds cost to publishers and they may not be convinced that breaking books down and managing micro payments is cost-
‘We always take all of the words delivered to us and put them in our platofrm’
effective. However, once in place, it is quite simple. It’s going to be driven by whether the content suits being sold in that manner. A high percentage of usage is still very traditional. People still want to print, copy and paste, and download PDFs to read at their leisure. But tablets and mobile devices are on
the up. PDFs are not particularly usable on mobile devices; they don’t resize and reflow particularly well. If publishers keep kicking out PDFs as their primary format it’s going to cause problems. We are a technology provider and we like challenges, but inevitably it takes more time and cost for the publisher.
EPUB and XML are perfect for small devices. However, it’s quite a leap of faith for publishers to let a device decide how their content is displayed.
The vast majority of textbooks come to us as PDFs. At the most blunt you could just display the PDF online but you could also render them in XML, which makes them more compatible with iOS, for example. We always take all of the words delivered to us and put them in our platform. We then can enable search, determine relevant links and do semantic enrichment. XML is the richest, purest way to proceed. Some publishers take ‘XML first’ as their vision; it’s the forward-looking way to produce content.
We see interest in apps but for very specific purposes. It’s not about taking a PDF and putting it into an app, but about what benefits an app can bring. Adding features to a website will always give you wider coverage and is the best way to spend your money. However, apps can be fantastic. The successful apps are very simple, such as calculators and supplementary tools.
Libraries have always been interested in usage statistics, and patron-driven acquisition (PDA) is liberating for them. They can make safer purchasing decisions and don’t have to pay for content until it’s used. PDA comes in many different flavours. The triggers are very variable and there is potential for publishers and aggregators to add offers and a range of options. However, there is a danger that PDA maybe provide too much choice, which could be scary for the publisher. Items sold as part of a collection are carved out as a weaker part, which could impact relationships with authors and editors.
Stephen Barr, president, SAGE International U
nless there are problems with issues such as rights restrictions, we publish all our books as e-books and in print. We launched our first e-book platform, SAGE Reference Online, in 2007, and our second, SAGE Knowledge, in 2012, expanding our direct supply of e-books to include 2,500 titles.
On the textbook side, our interactive e-books have page fidelity with the print version and include links to audio, video, interactive questionnaires, journal articles and handbook material. Some of our interactive e-books also work on a learning management system. We have published the fourth edition of Andy Field’s “Discovering Statistics with SPSS” as a digitally enhanced e-book. This features MobileStudy, which uses QR codes to enable smartphone and tablet users to access additional study and revision material. It also features WebAssign, enabling faculty to set regular online assignments for students, test them securely, chapter by chapter, and provide opportunities to reinforce class learning through additional online practice.
High-price reference books and monographs, sold traditionally to academic libraries, have
26 Research Information APR/MAY 2013
moved rapidly into e-book form. The dynamics are similar to those of the long-established market for digital journals; by delivering the book electronically, the publisher enables what used to be a static to be accessible to every user in the university. Textbooks have had a much slower take-up in e-book form. Students will choose to use an e-book if they receive a digital text as part of their course materials, if it is packaged for free with the printed book that they purchase, or if it is the lowest cost option. Lecturers have started to include availability of an e-book as a checklist item in their decisions about what books to use
‘The e-book may prove to be only a transitional format in delivering course content’
in their teaching. However, the e-book may prove only a transitional format in delivering content for courses. To support these transitions, we are also moving forward with delivery of learning materials for the college market in a variety of other formats, including open-access texts, online courses and mobile study tools.
Most e-books are not interactive, and so they don’t take advantage of the wide range of possibilities of linking from the text to other digital items. Those that do are creative in incorporating other media, intralinking from one part of the book to another, and inclusion of study tools. Interactive e-books can also incorporate current events, either by being developed in a web-based format that can be continually updated or by linking to sources that are being continually updated.
Enabling interactivity is becoming easier as major platforms such as Apple and Kno release authoring tools that enable publishers to add interactivity to their digital texts. As platforms adopt the EPUB 3 format, publishers will have additional options for the creation of interactive e-books. SAGE is currently pursuing a wide range of potential partnerships, pilots, and models that would include some level of open-access (OA) content. We are also exploring participation in important initiatives such as the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Initiative, which aims to provide very low-cost, quality educational content for students.
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