Feature
grelevant content, with clear indicators then showing exactly what content they could have access to. Researchers can now view content in HTML, download it as a PDF, and also send it to Dropbox, GoogleDrive or a Kindle.
And thousands of citation styles are
available, so users can collate references according to institution requirements, (see ‘A single platform’). ‘Research data also told us that users
have an appetite for reading on the screen, but many will actually download content to consume offline, at a later date,’ highlights Drummond. ‘So we made sure that the PDF positioning [on the content pages] was really prominent, so users can quickly download this without having to search for it.’
Importantly, Cambridge University
Press’s ebooks can also be bought through Amazon and other ebook vendors, with content available in EPUB and MOBI formats, and with interactive features. However, as Drummond’s colleague, Nisha Doshi, senior digital development publisher at CUP, points out: ‘Overwhelmingly, PDF and print are still in greatest demand, so we have to think very carefully about embedding these interactive features. If people ultimately use a PDF then we need to ensure these features are clearly signposted from the PDF, or indeed the print version, otherwise the majority of readers simply won’t be aware that they exist.’ Still, with Cambridge Core in place, both digital article use and chapter downloads have risen by around 25 per cent year- on-year, with user registrations growing every month. ‘We’ve haven’t seen any
fundamental flip from print to digital... but digital growth has been impressive,’ says Doshi. Vanessa Boddington, director of market
development at digital content provider, VitalSource, believes the shift from print to digital ebooks is underway. The company’s key market is students and educators, and at the beginning of 2018, some 7.8 million users were accessing e-textbooks from its platform. Yet early this year, user figures had swollen to 15 million. ‘This really is a fantastic trend and I think increasingly we are seeing this shift towards digital,’ says Boddington. ‘It’s been a long time coming but students are now consuming more and more of their content digitally.’ At the time of writing, 1,400 publishers, including industry heavyweights Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Cengage, provide e-textbooks to VitalSource, on a wide array of topics from art and business, to mathematics and technology. Users can download and read content using the company’s e-reader, Bookshelf. And while this content is available in either PDF or EPUB 3 formats, for Boddington, the future has to be EPUB 3.
“As industry edges towards feature-heavy formats, the issue of digital rights managements lingers”
A single platform
Cambridge University Press has hardly been alone in its efforts to consolidate its digital content. US-based aggregator, ProQuest, launched ProQuest One Academic earlier this year to encompass four of its key resources; ProQuest Central, Academic Complete, ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Global and Academic Video Online. Crucially, users can cross-
search ebooks, journals, news, videos and more, which ProQuest hopes will lead to more insightful knowledge discovery. And the company believes the platform will lift a huge administrative burden from
6 Research Information April/May 2019
librarians’ shoulders. ‘This is about simplifying
customer access and could allow smaller institutions to forgo setting up a discovery platform,’ highlights Rich Belanger, senior vice president and general manager of Books at ProQuest. ‘We’re getting [content] onto a single common platform which dramatically simplifies things from the perspective of the librarian.’
Brave new content Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press launched what it calls ‘a new concept in publishing’. Cambridge Elements
provides an outlet for research that sits outside the traditional formats of a book or journal article. Organised in focused series,
work of between 50 to 120 pages will be published digitally and through print-on-demand. Crucially, this content will be published in just 12 weeks. ‘This is envisaged as a hybrid
between book and journals and the quick, 12-week turnaround really isn’t something you see in traditional book publishing yet is so important to authors who want to get their content out there, and readers who want up- to-date content,’ says Doshi.
Seventy series are already
under contract on topics ranging from electronics to ancient Egypt. A total of two hundred individual texts are expected to be published this year; the publisher then expects to publish some 250 texts in every subsequent year. ‘The series are digital first,
so we have the ability to embed audio, video, code, datasets and more, with content being available in all the formats you would expect from a book; HTML, PDF, EPUB and MOBI, as well as print,’ says Doshi. ‘Content will also be indexed in all the ways you would expect from a journal.’
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
Nisha Doshi, senior digital develpment publisher at CUP
‘Some of our publisher partners
produce both PDF and EPUB formats, while others produce purely PDF, but we encourage our publishers to supply as much content in EPUB 3 format as possible, to get away from that perception of e-textbooks as being just print under glass,’ she says. ‘We wish to increase accessibility, learning outcomes and contribute to student success, and [PDFs] just don’t provide an interactive learning experience for students.’ Boddington also believes re-flowable text enabled by EPUB file formats is gaining in importance. ‘Whatever device you are viewing your ebook on, EPUB provides a much friendlier user experience,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing worse than trying to manipulate a PDF on a mobile phone, and for students with visual disabilities, it’s just easier to zoom in with reflowable text.’
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