Exhibition floor, Online Information 2008
If there was a dominant theme out on the floor of this year’s Online Information 2008 show at Olympia, it had to be the continuing rise of e-books. I conducted a brief survey of opinions from the stands and, even discounting for the tendency of suppliers to talk up their own market, it was an optimistic view that emerged.
The last year has seen barriers to adoption both financial and attitudinal subside. New tools coming into the marketplace have dramatically reduced the cost of producing e-books. Apprehensions about issues such as back-file access – if you cancel a subscription where does the e-book go? – have noticeably dwindled, according to Ebsco’s John Reid.
So which are the sectors that are adopting fastest?
E-books surge in Education, Retail and Health
Helped by government initiatives such as JISC funding for publishers, the market is maturing in Higher Education. No surprise there perhaps: HE has been a long-time user of e-books. But for Dan Breeze of Coutts Information Services, it is the development of a market in Further Education which is perhaps more significant: ‘this is a market that just wasn’t there a year ago’. And the upcoming JISC initiative targeted at FE can hardly hurt matters in this area.
Similarly, Ernst Kallus of Libre Digital points to significantly increased uptake in retail, a traditionally reticent sector, fueled in the past year by Waterstones and the introduction of the Sony Reader.
E-books are also developing fast in the NHS, driven by devolution of healthcare to GP surgeries (those who have had the slightly disconcerting experience of seeing a GP Google up their symptoms will be reassured, no doubt, to know that more authoritative sources are also available in surgeries!).
Drivers
Among the institutions, as in Education, pressure on shelf-space is a big driver for e-books; but the added value offered by searchability and other ‘converged’ effects (such as adding Web 2.0 style social networking capability) is undoubtedly coming into play.
Third party deals with hardware suppliers such as Lenovo make it possible for an HE institution to supply a student not just with a reading list but with the actual texts themselves in digital form, loaded onto a laptop – along with the capability to exchange notes and to discuss insights with the course tutors and other students.
According to Mark Howard of Dawson Books, today’s students regard print as an anachronism and expect digital resources to be available as a matter of course (no pun intended). The larger academic publishers have certainly got this message; it is perhaps librarians who have lagged – though even here knowledge (and even enthusiasm) are picking up, to judge by the steady stream of them I saw pitching up at the DawsonEra stand during the day.
Prospects for 2009
Of the people talked to, Martin Marlow of Ingram Digital was probably the most bullish about the market, saying we were ‘over the tipping point’. E-books are, in his view, now seen as an inevitability rather than a ‘nice to have ’. Recession may lengthen decision times, but will otherwise not slow the market significantly, since a lot of the necessary upfront investment has already been made.
Others too were sanguine about downturn effects: Ernst Kallus of Libre Digital pointed out that Publishing traditionally does well in a recession. And while Mark Howard thinks the worst is yet come, in that the next round of Education budgets will almost certainly bring funding cuts impacting 2010 spend, he also sees counterbalancing, positive forces at work. One of these is the sheer utility of e-books for academic study and reference, which make them especially useful for distance learning – a significant export market for HE. Another is a fresh wave of adoption poised to hit in the ‘mid-market’ of academic publishers. Now that the larger publishers have all adopted, and are showing profitable results, there’s no longer an argument for delaying adoption among smaller publishers.
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Richard Padley
Managing Director,
Semantico
At Sussex (Uni) we have had a number of ebooks for a while. They are listed here http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/resources/ebooks.php (though the main way of discovering them is through the main catalogue).
Personally, I’m interested in looking at the ‘cost per usage(based on COUNTER)’ comparing the one-off purchases with the annual subscriptions (normally in packages). The former will only see their cost per use go down each year, as the cost stays the same and the usage goes up.
A key factor is getting the records of ebooks in to a library catalogue. Clearly the user wants to search for a book they need in the normal way, and discover it is both on the shelf and online.
They don’t (and wont) go off to a third party website on the off chance they have a book they need online.
This (like online journals) is really changing the nature of library catalogues. They were designed for records being added and maintained one at a time, with little change needed once added. With online resources we need to add large batches of records at once, and have a mechanism to automatically add/change/delete from this large batch when a supplier updates their ebook package. Library systems (and suppliers) need to improve how their systems can meet these new needs, perhaps using web services or metadata harvesting/syncing.
Chris
Hi Chris,
Driving discoverability is the key issue for online publishing. We always push publishers to integrate with the library catalogues, but unfortunately many don’t understand the value of this. We have provided static MARC record downloads on some of the platforms we have built for publishers (e.g. Oxford Reference Online) for some time, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Clearly the static download option for MARC is not really attractive, for the reasons you mention, namely that is does not work well in an environment where the online resource changes over time, as content is added and updated.
The OAI-PMH protocol would be a good technical solution here, but as its principal usage is in the institutional repository context I am not sure how well the current library catalogues support this. Its an area for further research, clearly.
We’ve also started to support the specific meta-search protocols in newer developments for some clients. Although this solution does offer good integration and enhances discoverability for the end user, the technical challenges (merging, performance, scalability …) with federated searching remain, as I am sure you are familiar, problematic.
Richard