FEATURE
E-book aggregators
per cent justified by use. We have libraries in Australia that are in their eighth year of using short-term loans as part of their DDA programmes, demonstrating the long-term sustainability of the model, and providing excellent statistics over time. DDA or PDA plays a significant role in e-book acquisition. It’s been a major driver in e-book adoption in libraries and has really helped fuel the transition of print books to e-books. It has helped bring books back into the mix with e-journals.
The beauty of DDA is the breadth of choice it offers; providing a critical mass and demonstrating the real demand for books generally. It has brought a lot of efficiency to both the acquisition process for libraries
and access for the end-users. The model has boosted the discoverability of book content for all content from all publishers. It has, to a good degree, democratised discovery and increased usage for many publishers and their authors who may previously have been excluded. For all of these reasons, I believe it’s played a very important role to date as we are transitioning from print books to e-books. How this model plays out over time remains to be seen – but, as with any market, the models and pricing mature in line with the market and within the influences of the wider environment. The model has been moderately disruptive to the traditional acquisition model and workflows for the better as e-book adoption and usage matures. As we see the effects of the model on the full supply
chain over time – from publishers to end users – I expect we’ll see the model evolve; exactly how remains to be seen. Aggregators
will continue to build in
efficiencies and value around the acquisition of and the access to e-books. For users, this will include the continued innovation around access but also around scholarly sharing and collaboration. For libraries, we will continue to refine workflows and discovery making it easier for libraries to acquire, manage and assess their e-book collections. We have a growing body of data around
e-book usage and we will soon be able to harvest this usage in increasingly meaningful ways, providing progressively useful recommendations to libraries and the end-users alike.
Bob Nardini, vice president product development, Ingram Coutts, Ingram Content Group
L
ibrary book budgets have been under pressure for years, and the portion of those budgets earmarked for e-books, which grew slowly for years, recently has grown much more rapidly. We are seeing a demand for e-books in virtually every subject area, although it’s no surprise that demand is highest in areas like business, science, and technology.
Ingram Content Group has aggregated more than half a million titles for the library community from more than 900 publishers on our MyiLibrary platform, one of the leading e-book platforms used by libraries today. From those titles, it’s not unusual for libraries to purchase from hundreds of different publishers in a given year. If we had not gathered a comprehensive selection of titles from a wide range of publishers on a single platform, libraries and their readers would need to navigate possibly hundreds of different interfaces, understand varying business policies, and devise multiple workflows to purchase the same set of titles; that’s a lot of time and effort. We doubt libraries would be able to offer patrons the range of titles they can today without help from aggregators. There are more e-book aggregators today than there were in 2004 when MyiLibrary launched, and competition among them is vigorous. In some cases, aggregators are competing, but are also collaborating at the same time, as Ingram
22 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2014
‘There are more e-book aggregators today than there were in 2004 when MyiLibrary launched, and competition among them is vigorous’
does today with both EBSCO and EBL, two e-book aggregators whose titles we now offer with MyiLibrary titles on our OASIS content platform for academic libraries. MyiLibrary e-book titles were already “aggregated,” so to speak, with their print counterparts on OASIS, along with a comprehensive selection of all the print books a library might need. While the importance of e-books to academic
libraries has grown since 2004, print books also remain important. Making possible a single library selection and acquisitions routine for print and e-books together is a powerful proposition, even more so with several aggregators offered on the same interface. It’s obvious that the importance of e-books has grown for libraries. However, it’s been the library workflows enabled by aggregators that have really fuelled that growth. This is a major advantage e-book aggregators have over standalone publisher platforms.
Libraries and their patrons want access to
e-books at all times, for online viewing and for downloading, with as little interference as possible from the DRM mechanisms publishers require from aggregators. DRM protects content for publishers, but also drives libraries toward their own platforms, where DRM is usually more
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