Biz/ed Premier from Cengage Learning, formerly Thomson Learning, exploits the growing interest in e-books in academia, in particular business studies. It is a subscription-based service with the content of the e-books supplied direct from the Cengage stable. It boasts curricula-relevant textbooks as well as a combination of complementary journal articles and critical viewpoints.

Because the product is an open web application, Cengage says that the site
can encourage students not conducting active library database searches to engage in using them. The benefit for budget-holding course tutors and librarians is that content is up to date and gets around the problem of restocking old earningmaterial.

One of the strong selling points for Biz/ed Premier is its Critical View points material.This complementary content is intended to add context to academic material and is sourced from a variety of related business journals and publi-cations such as IWR sister title Accountancy Age. Each Critical Viewpoint is matched to relevant course material by the Biz/ed Premier editorial staff.

All boxes ticked then? Unfortunately not, as more than a few obstacles
cropped up along thewaywhen I tried it out. Some of these were intentional and
understandable – others not so. The initial steps to access the library are fairly simple, as is the interface. The core subjects are split into business studies; business studieswith marketing and tourism; then accounting and finance and economics.

Users drill their way through a series of drop-down menus until they come to the sector or publication they are after. A jacket image and synopsis pop up before
a user is able to access any of the interactive e-books.

Badly behaved pop-up

To tap into the e-books you need theDX Reader program, for which you have to
register. It was around this point that I started to encounter problems. For a
start it takes a little too long to load, and several times I was unable to access the
page. When I did go further, a screen popped up that refused to be resized –
despite its covering the toolbar. Programs that take over the desktop with
such disregard for a user’sworking practices are annoying.

The time counter that ticks down at the head of the page is equally exasperating.
Biz/ed limits its subscription to 15 concurrent users,who are restricted to a
120-minute window in any one setting.

Feeling that two hours is generosity indeed, Cengage says the limits are
intended to ensure that “the full concurrency level is not blocked” but adds thatit will always be happy to review this. Some work still needs to be done on
the e-book layout, too. For example, the navigation bar on the left sits in a fixed,
narrow column, which inevitably cuts off chapter headings, leaving the user to
guess what they are clicking on. There is a scroll bar, but it would be easier if the
text wrapped to fit.

Although using the e-pages themselves is generally a speedy affair, woe betide anyone who tries to copy and paste text, print a page or even take a screenshot. The system refused to allow any of these operations and on one occasion
even threw me out.

Squinting at serifs

So why would anyone want to print any e-book pages out? Because Biz/ed displays
them in Times New Roman – a font that does notmake for easy reading onscreen. There aren’tmany people who can – or, indeed, want to – read whole chapters of books online like this, let alone in the knowledge that the countdown
clock is ticking away.

In terms of tools, the DX Reader supports annotation and the bookmarking
of pages. There is even a highlighting toolwith a selection of attractive colours.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any of them to work.

Biz/ed Premier may well be worth looking into for its content. Business
academic readers will be able to decide that one for themselves. But as an interface, Biz/ed Premier comes across as a little too rushed, untested and rather
more beta than alpha.

IN BRIEF
www.bized.co.uk

Worthy content, but interface needs development