Higher Education
from Cambridge University Press
This home for our digital textbooks, shaped by extensive feedback from librarians, students and instructors, provides easy, affordable access to eTextbooks, together with supplementary teaching and learning materials such as video and audio lessons, interactive texts, and infographics.
Users can • bookmark • annotate • highlight • cut and paste (20% by word count) • print (20% by page count)
Content • automatically resizes for mobile device display
• can be read both on and offline using our e-reader app
Accessibility is ensured via • adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
• an annual accessibility audit • accreditation from the Digital Accessibility Centre
Instructors can request examination copies, and can create group annotations to share with students.
Librarians receive valuable usage data, including COUNTER5 reporting.
Access is provided through an annual lease, either to individual titles or to collections that grow as new books are published. Leases allow for an unlimited number of concurrent users.
As higher education institutions prepare for a more digitally driven future, the structure and function of the site prioritize continuous accessibility for all, so that libraries are better equipped to support all patrons.
Find out more:
cambridge.org/highereducation
gelectronic, are under pressure for the majority of institutions because of the need to continue to finance increasing subscription costs for journals. Everything we talk about, in terms of ebook development, has to be seen through that lens as well. It has an important influence on the models that are chosen and acquisition policies.” The challenge for publishers is to find
those models that are acceptable to everyone, providing seamless access to the users at a cost the institutions can afford and that reflects the value of the work in a sustainable manner.
A complex ebook ecosystem Finding a solution to this challenge has led to an increasingly complex ebook ecosystem, as anyone with experience of the ebook market will attest. It is a marketplace that can be increasingly difficult to navigate and with a wide range of models and accompanying metrics. For Ashcroft, a number of trends add
to this complexity: “The fact that you can so easily track usage and demand for ebooks, and also budgetary pressures, has meant there’s been a shift towards demand-driven acquisition, evidence- based acquisition and all those other usage-driven models as well. There’s been a huge proliferation in the number of platforms as well… third-party offers by aggregators, traditional large resellers, and publishers who develop their own platforms and ebook offerings.” He says this means managing the business of acquisition, cataloguing and all the other library processes has become more challenging: “Librarians try to navigate the different offers and the different models and the different pricing, and then educate users about where they can access content. The complexity of the whole landscape has become mind-boggling. We’re probably not doing ourselves a favour as an industry by making it so complex for users to navigate, because ultimately your researcher or student just wants to get quickly to the information they need to use and then move on and do their jobs.”
Continuing innovation While models such as evidence-based acquisition and front-list ordering were unusual 10 years ago, they are now prevalent, says Macdonald. New models and schemes are being explored all the time, particularly in the area of open access, he adds. One example is CUP’s Flip It Open, which aims to fund open access publication through typical purchasing habits. Once a certain revenue
‘As new models appear, others will inevitably disappear in the creative destruction of the market place’
threshold has been reached, the book becomes available as open access and as an affordable paperback. As Macdonald points out, however,
innovative models are not just about open access: “Open access is an interesting market trend, and is driving a lot of activity, but something with even bigger implications is textbooks. If you ask libraries, what’s the biggest pain point for them? Is it open access ebooks or textbooks? I’m sure that nine out of 10 would say textbooks. That’s not to diminish the kind of exciting possibilities of open access monographs, but textbooks is probably a more immediate market issue. “We launched a successful true library model for e-textbooks in 2020, called the Cambridge Higher Education website. It’s not based on one-to-one pricing for students, it’s based on flat fees for the institution, with unlimited access. What’s really exciting about that is that we sell quite often in collections, so an institution will have access to a collection of textbooks, which means that as new books are published, as new editions are published, institutions have access to those as they come. It’s an example of where it’s moving away from a print mindset on ebooks, and getting a real benefit from having an ebook.” As new models appear, others will
inevitably disappear in the creative destruction of the market place, and as parts of the market reach saturation point. Ashcroft notes: “The market at some point will reach saturation point for the big sort of backlist or archive deal, and we will see usage-based models come more under pressure. Short term loans and demand- driven acquisition are probably not going to be around long-term because they don’t represent viable sustainable models for publishers. Evidence-based acquisition is probably something that is going to be around more long-term, but with changes to ensure that the content that is made available, effectively for free, is limited in some way.”
@researchinfo |
www.researchinformation.info
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