Feature g As Boddington highlights, content
delivered through the VitalSource platform can have a host of features applied to it such as notes, highlights and citations that are synced across all devices used to access Bookshelf. Students can also share mark-ups with colleagues, search across all e-text books in their Bookshelf collection, and study in ‘Review Mode’, using notes and highlights without the distraction of full-reading mode. ‘Lecturers might want to put a link in a
text to students, to, say, watch a YouTube video and when this is used we see a lot of interaction from the students,’ says Boddington. ‘Notes and highlights are probably the most important interactivity right now,’ she adds. ‘But I believe that as more content is available in EPUB 3, we will start to see [publishers] including more interactive content, such as videos, and question and answers at the end of a chapter.’ ‘When you talk to students they are used
to content with audio and video, and they really want to interact with it,’ she adds. Indeed, VitalSource recently worked with the British and Irish Music Association to create content for teaching students how to play musical instruments. VitalSource provided an authoring tool that allowed the association to convert documents from a PDF format to EPUB 3
“Change is also afoot among the aggregators”
files, which included videos of musicians playing a variety of instruments, including the guitar. ‘We deliver maths, science, English, business content and more, and it’s all about taking this beyond simply reading the words on a page,’ she adds. In a similar vein, Rich Belanger, senior
vice president and general manager of books at ProQuest, is seeing a rising demand for features such as searchability, cite and annotate in ebooks. What’s more, his company will be delivering what he describes as ‘its EPUB online experience’ in the third quarter of this year, and already has more than 200,000 EPUB titles ready to launch.
‘Mobile usage continues to grow and
we think we’re going to see continued demand for EPUB,’ he says. ‘With its video and audio objects, EPUB is so much better for mobile devices, as well as accessibility for people with visual impairments.’ ‘Publishers tell us that they are moving towards EPUB formats and may even flip
8 Research Information April/May 2019
Vicky Drummond, Cambridge University Press
from PDF to EPUB, and this would be ideal from our perspective,’ he adds. ‘Quite frankly, PDFs on mobile devices look awful and I think it actually hinders ebook adoption today.’
Digital Rights Matters But as industry edges towards feature- heavy formats, the issue of digital rights managements lingers. Still, in response to the growing demand for DRM-free ebooks, most notably from academic librarians, more and more DRM-free content is reaching the scholarly publishing marketplace. Cambridge University Press, for one, has
broadly taken the standpoint that users should not be prohibited from reading what is important to them. As Doshi points out: ‘We don’t want to lock our content down, so that researchers can’t read it when they want to, although we do take a different stance for different types of publishing.’ ‘For text books, for example, content
tends to be available on our platform in read-only format, whereas research content can be downloaded and shared,’ she adds. Shortly after launching Cambridge
Core, Cambridge University Press added a content-sharing service to the platform – Cambridge Core Share – designed to allow users to quickly and easily share content. As part of this, authors and subscribers generate a read-only link to, say, a journal article, which can be shared online so that anyone can read the final published version of an article for free. Users can also generate a PDF
containing a link to a journal article, so users can more easily share links on, say, ResearchGate and
Academia.edu. The publisher is currently looking into extending the service to ebooks.
Rich Belanger, senior vice president at ProQuest
As Drummond also highlights, content
authors need to understand the impact of their work, and as such, content use is tracked. ‘We understand that users want to share content, and we want to support this in a responsible way,’ she says. Change is also afoot among the
aggregators. In April last year, EBSCO released a DRM-free ebook solution; given the wide variety of content hosted by large aggregators, these businesses had typically struggled to provide DRM-free ebooks. However, EBSCO’s latest system gave publishers the choice to allow some content to be sold DRM-free while retaining protections on other titles. And consequently, libraries could then choose to buy either unlimited-user DRM-free content or a cheaper limited user option when unlimited access wasn’t necessary. In the last year, ProQuest has launched
DRM-free full book downloads, as well as enhanced DRM-free chapter downloads with quite spectacular results. ‘We’re seeing huge growth in chapter downloads and full book DRM-free downloads with chapter downloads probably growing the fastest,” says Belanger. “So we intend to add another 100,000 books with DRM-free content by the end of 2019.’ As the ProQuest senior vice president, points out, right now, more than 80 per cent of the company’s content has some level of DRM-free access and this figure is set to grow to more than 90 per cent by the end of this year. Clearly, such industry developments stand testament to the slow but steady embrace of the scholarly ebook. ‘Maybe five or 10 years ago, ebook
availability was a huge issue...but today overall ebook sales are trending up,’ adds Belanger. ‘We’re not Google, this is the library market, however, ebook usage is going through the roof.’
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
