E-books can free up shelf space, reduce costs and provide librarians with usage data that lets them build collections of what library users really want. And there’s more: e-books and e-textbooks can provide more effective teaching and learning, with interactive features, search facilities and even links to teaching and learning communities and systems. So why, with so much in their favour, have e-books not taken the market by storm?
Admittedly, e-journals are now the norm and account for the vast majority of libraries’ journal access. But publishers are only dipping their toes into e-book provision and steer clear of e-textbooks for fear of losing a major revenue stream.
Much of the testing of the waters is going on in the US where required textbooks are common. The lecturer recommends electronic versions of texts to students, and the adoption rate is like for like with textbooks.
In the UK, things are different. Students are poorer and lecturers do not usually make specific textbooks compulsory reading.
Faced with a plethora of delivery models, librarians have been sending mixed messages about what they want. Mark Carden, senior VP at e-books aggregator Myilibrary, says: “With e-journals, a lot of suppliers went down the bundled route and people were forced to buy the good with the bad. The question is, will they do that with e-books and try to sell collections? We can create subject collections, which libraries prefer to publisher packages. But they also want the option to buy title by title.”
Carden says that business models are at an experimental stage: “Libraries are saying it is too complex and needs to be simple: there are too many rules and access needs to be perpetual. Yet when you offer a package you soon find their demands are more complex.”
A number of projects and commercial pilots are under way to find out what libraries and individual students and researchers really want from e-books. It is a critical time for libraries to thrash out e-book supply with publishers and aggregators, many of whom have a strong focus on individual sales to students. One-to-one e-book sales can be made to closely replicate the business model of hard-copy sales and pose less of a threat to the publishers’ bottom line than the potential one-to-many sales to libraries.
No dosh for E
But a number of factors are likely to drive e-books into libraries ultimately,
not least the inability of UK students to afford textbooks of any flavour. In
the US there is a student movement campaigning for free textbooks and librarians
are keen to respond to this. But Carden says that while the expectation is that
electronic delivery will slash costs, this doesn’t stack up with the reality
that “paper and shipping account for only 5-10% of the cost of a book”.
Caren Milloy, e-books project manager at the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which promotes technology in education, says: “Having just discussed the question of business models at 12 workshops with over 250 librarians, I do not believe that the library procurement process will become redundant. The majority of the librarians at the workshops, representing 131 institutions, believe that the library should provide their students with free-at-the-point-of-use e-textbooks and that the cost should be covered by the library.
“We all know that, based on current models, it is not sustainable to transfer the revenue from students to the library budget. But librarians are increasingly facing high demand for course texts online due to increased student numbers and expectations that the library should provide access to all content.”
There is a consensus that textbooks are what people want to see most in electronic form. Rossella Proscia, marketing director at Cengage Learning, says: “E-textbooks have the highest demand in the market, specifically in the library market, but there is a gap between the demand and what is on offer. The barrier is from the publishers’ point of view as there is concern about what may happen to print revenues; for the majority of publishers, this is a stumbling block.”
Electronic textbooks are very attractive to the academic community if the price is right. They allow students to search and annotate in multiple ways beyond what a print version can offer. And e-textbooks online offer a whole extra social networking dimension to teaching and learning.
Lecturers can highlight parts of the text that may then be shared with the student body, for example. Students can connect to learning community forums that offer discussion and referral as well as the facility to rate the textbooks and give feedback.
Live author chat
Updates and revisions to an e-textbook will be possible before a print edition
can incorporate corrections, and the signs are that users are willing to pay for
this, especially in scientific areas where things change fast. Live online chat
and discussions with the author could be another feature.
Cengage dipped its toes into the e-textbook world last year with the launch of iChapters direct to students in the US from its website. It is just starting to develop iChapters for Europe and other parts of the world, which are scheduled to get them later this year.
With iChapters, students get the opportunity to buy chunks of content rather than just the whole book, although Proscia warns that this option will not necessarily be available for every book and the service has only just started.
“Discounts vary a lot,” she says. “We offer six major brands, with discounts ranging from 10% up to 50%. Access is offered for students on an individual basis; it is a one-to-one transaction.”
Access is for just six months and has to be renewed. The six-monthly access is based on the US market, according to Proscia, as some courses run for just one term. In the UK and Europe, this happens a lot less, so Cengage is tailoring the product at the moment to this market.
Publishers are planning different ways to integrate e-books into academic systems to ensure uptake and usage. The obvious place to integrate e-book provision is into the virtual learning environment (VLE) but this is a tough challenge.
“We are not very far down the road of integration with VLEs,” says Proscia. “There are so many VLEs and then there is Moodle [open source software for creating online learning communities]; more and more universities are using that. There is no standard in VLEs, although Cengage and others deliver cartridges of content that can be uploaded into VLEs.
“Another way we can see e-books going is making them part of the learning experience and integrating them into workflow. There is more and more technology to help lecturers in teaching and assessing of students, so, for example, testing and assessment systems could integrate e-books with that workflow and it might increase take-up. If e-books are integrated, they will become a more prominent part of the learning.”
Waiting for the publishers
Jay Katzen, managing director for academic and government at Elsevier’s e-book
platform Science Direct, believes the real benefits of e-books will be felt once
publishers have adapted the publishing process more thoroughly to the needs of
electronic publishing.
“There have been a lot of advances in search and access but there needs to be a publisher paradigm shift so that more information is put in at the creation of content such as better tags,” he says. “That will enable a better user experience at the end. A lot of stuff has to happen at the front-end if we’re to do better at the back-end; we are very involved in developing search technologies and XML.”
Katzen does not think publisher concerns about loss of print revenue are de laying improvements to front-end content production: “People will invest in that anyway because in the end they will benefit. By making the product more valuable to customers there is less worry about losing print revenues.”
As e-book production becomes more sophisticated there is nothing technically to stop e-books from being made available to search engines, improving discoverability and searchability at a stroke. Publishers’ fears about revenue loss are being addressed by a new content access protocol to let them keep control of content while allowing it to be crawled for the web.
The Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) lets publishers explore what they can do with content to make it machine-readable by search engines. A growing number of publishers including e-book publishers are implementing it.
Confidence builder
ACAP project manager Mark Bide says: “If publishers can become more confident
that business partners on the network are able automatically to interpret and
comply with the content owner’s policies on re-use, ultimately more content will
be made available to end-users through more channels. In particular, it will
become much easier to make premium content available through intermediary
services such as search engines.”
Macmillan-owned MPS Technologies is the only participating publisher in the ACAP project that is focusing solely on e-books, in the form of its Bookstore platform.
ACAP’s commercial director, David Sommer, says: “We’re working with e-book publishers on the levels of granularity they want and what percentage of the book they want to make available free, and what percentage of the book can be viewed after log-in; they can specify the percentage to show, along the lines of the Google news model and they can provide information such as the need for subscription.”
Sommer believes that in two to three years’ time users are generally not going to be thinking about something being a journal or a book, but about con tent, and that publishers are responding to that: “We are starting to see publishers creating platforms for journals and books together and some platforms are cross-searchable.
“The more traditional publishers where the books department is very separate from the journals are having to change quite rapidly. They are not just marketing to conventional customers but combining their offering, slicing and dicing chapters and journal articles, and creating brand-new content.
“For the first time publishers are having to get their journal and book people together and think about business models. They can experiment in a low-risk way; for example, one month they can offer access to a book at 10% of the cover price and gather data on usage. It is a challenge: publishers can’t pad stuff with less valuable content any more.”
According to a spokesperson from e-book supplier Netlibrary, the concept of a book in electronic form is disappearing already: “When students conduct research, rather than identifying several books and then searching within those books, most often they will simply perform a full-text search across the tens of thousands of e-books in their library’s catalogue to find the exact sections they need irrespective of the book entity they reside in. The actual book entity is only of interest after the fact for citation purposes.”
University College London’s CIBER research centre is carrying out the SuperBook project, which involves dropping about 3,000 selected e-texts into the UCL community and then watching what happens. Early findings from user surveys indicate that information behaviour is gendered and very variable.
Chris Armstrong, a contributor to the SuperBook project, points out that e-journal and e-book delivery are very different and there is not a natural progression from one to another.
“Journals are more granular; access is to the article, which has an abstract, while access to and abstracts for e-books tend to be at the book level,” he says. “Journals are also serials, so an access habit can be built up.” the run-up factor
Armstrong points out that journals were the focus of online abstract and inde xing bibliographic databases for some years, so the transition to full text was a natural, understood progression; there is no similar set of products to ease users into e-books.
The transition to e-books will bring evolution in the role of librarians seeking to offer best-value collections as actual usage patterns are finally revealed. In the past, the only tool that libraries had to track book usage was the dust test. Measurement of usage will be key to librarians, publishers and aggregators as they all move towards working out what people want and how to pay for it or profit from it.
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E-BOOKS DIRECT TO STUDENTS: THE JOHN SMITH PILOT
Many students buy course texts from the university bookshop, so Ingram Digital
Group and sister company university bookshop chain John Smith got together to
offer students the option of purchasing e-books.
John Smith now offers 10 titles in all from Pearson, Sage and Cengage after Tony Newson, strategic marketing manager of John Smith, was seconded to Ingram to bring the project to fruition. He says: “Rather than going to the publisher and asking what they were prepared to release, we went to lecturers and asked what they wanted.
“One of the issues for publishers is that a lot of textbooks originate in America and they would have to contact their parent companies to make sure they had electronic rights and to negotiate on terms because John Smith wanted some discount.”
Getting students to use e-book resources is problematic, according to Newson, and at least one university is trialling a bursary scheme where tuition fees are ringfenced and returned as a bursary to be spent on specified elements including books. This is happening at the University of East London, where the bursary can only be used for certain purposes such as transport, child care and books.
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E-BOOKS OBSERVATORY: EARLY FINDINGS
Three-quarters of all higher education institutions are participating in the
JISC national e-books observatory project, which aims to remove the bottleneck
that restricts the number of course texts made available online through
libraries. A number of publishers have agreed to make core texts available as
e-books through libraries for a period of time.
JISC has just received a massive and surprising response to its first user survey, which had just closed with 20,000 responses as IWR went to press. This covered time spent reading online, the role of the academic library, how users find e-books, how frequently they use them, how often they buy print books, whether staff are aware of e-books and whether they recommend e-book versions.
Caren Milloy, e-books project manager, says: “Here at JISC Collections one of our first reactions to the survey data – and this is before any in-depth analysis, so really is a first glance – is ‘where are all the print sales?’ The data seems to be saying that students are not buying print books, that if they do they are second-hand, and that they often share a title with friends.
“If this is combined with information I received while undertaking the JISC e-books UK roadshow from librarians who had undertaken surveys within their institutions, student spending on textbooks looks to be on the decline. Where then are all the sales that the publishers are protecting?”
JISC has funded CIBER (a UCL School of Library, Archive and Information Studies research centre) to assess user behaviours and expectations and establish whether print sales are declining because of free-at-the-point-of-use online course texts.
The project is intended to help create innovative pricing, licensing and promotional models that are based on actual use and real knowledge rather than assumptions.
The survey’s initial findings suggest there is very real interest in e-books. Most respondents (60.1%) already use e-books, so this is not an immature market with a few early adopters.
Students and staff say they prefer to use virtual library services from home, and a large majority of university teachers (69.8%) say they recommend e-books to their students, while nearly half say their students regularly report back problems concerning the library’s provision of print textbooks.
A further survey will be carried out at the end of the project.
