FEATURE
E-books Scott Wasinger, vice president, e-books & audiobooks, EBSCO W
e find that the most popular model for acquiring e-book titles is an ownership model, with flexible options based on the number of simultaneous users that a library wants to establish for each title purchased. Patron driven acquisition (PDA) helps libraries to preserve their budget while maintaining control over the collection development process. Libraries can create PDA title lists using specific criteria and expose the bibliographic records to end users without purchasing the titles. A title on the PDA list is
‘Lack of understanding of e-book models can cause frustration to patrons’
triggered for purchase when a patron directly accesses the title, guaranteeing that only those titles with significant usage are purchased. There are e-book packages offered on an annual subscription basis with unlimited simultaneous user access at a fraction of the cost of purchase. The packages include a large number of titles across a broad range of subjects,
with new titles added regularly at no additional cost.
A new option is the short-term loan model for libraries that need to fulfill a patron title request but do not wish to purchase the title outright. This rental option can also help libraries avoid turn-aways for titles with high check-out probability.
There is a wealth of difference in how we experience a book electronically, depending on the kind of book it is – fiction, nonfiction, a scholarly work, an encyclopaedia, a dictionary, or, indeed, not a book at all, but rather a magazine. Within an e-book, users have extensive options for navigating, searching, note-taking, saving, downloading, exporting citations, and creating durable links to pages or chapters. As an aggregator, EBSCO is not able to control the content of e-books but having e-books available on our platform allows users to cross- search magazines, journals, newspapers and other types of content along with e-books.
Alexandra Jenner, e-products manager, Woodhead Publishing W
e launched Woodhead Publishing Online (high-level STM e-books) in 2010 and Chandos Publishing Online (library and information science and Asian studies e-books) in 2011. We have seen a 70 per cent uplift in sales in 2012. However, our print sales are still very healthy and print is still dominant in our company. About 18 to 20 per cent of our business is e-products today. I think we’re quite lucky that the type of publisher we are enables us to fit into niches that others don’t, and with e-books we seem to be diversifying into new markets. We sell e-books in packages to institutions, with a multi-user, perpetual-access model. Perpetual access is winning versus subscription; people liken e-books less to journals and more to the print-book model. We also have a pick-and-mix option where customers can choose any 12 or more e-books, after which they can choose titles one-by- one. Many customers are going through an experimental phase with e-books and are monitoring migration. We do fairly short print runs and reprints if necessary. A good portion of
28 Research Information APR/MAY 2013
our books are enrolled with Lightning Source for print on demand.
The challenges of e-books are: finding a
model to suit all customers; the start-up costs of developing a platform and creating/converting all the digital files; and protecting our print business, which is still our bread and butter.
‘STM institutions usually go for e-books but we have had a very good take-up with our social science e-books too’
Woodhead Publishing Online and Chandos Publishing Online appeal to different customers with different specialities, although both our e-books platforms are on MetaPress and have similar layouts. Libraries budgets are very different and the price point of the Chandos books is lower. These are available book-by- book but tend not to lend themselves to chapter- by-chapter sales because they are shorter than the Woodhead books and usually written by a sole author. Our Woodhead e-books are multi-
contributor (we have over 10,000 Woodhead contributors). STM institutions usually go for e-books but we have found very good take-up with our social science e-books too. It very much depends on the territory and how easily you can penetrate the market.
By the end of 2013 we plan to have 1,046
e-books on Woodhead Publishing Online. On the Chandos platform we expect to have 323 e-books in library and information management and 55 in Asian studies. We plan to expand our list with new collections. We have fair amount of printed titles that have not yet been digitised. We always try to do front and back list together in a collection, which is important as we want to make sure we add content systematically and thoroughly. Developing an e-book platform, converting a list and getting the model right are big challenges. In the beginning we did a large survey of several hundred librarians, asking about things like DRM, purchase models, and whether users would need remote access and we listened to the responses. With the DRM question we had such strong feedback that people didn’t want it.
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Libraries have to understand the various platforms, content, and methods of collection development available and integrate
understanding in their current processes.
Lack of patron understanding of e-book models can cause frustration when they find that an e-book is not available. This is beginning to be less of a challenge as more and more publishers are making their content available under an unlimited user option. EBSCO has partnered with YBP to allow
librarians to order EBSCO e-books through GOBI3. This partnership means that librarians accustomed to selecting and managing their e-book collections through GOBI now have additional access options for the nearly 370,000 e-book titles from EBSCO. EBSCO has to
also allow partnered with Ingram
ordering through OASIS. These partnerships allow libraries to buy EBSCO e-books without creating a new workflow for their selectors and approvers.
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