The national e-books observatory project will assess the impacts, observe behaviours and develop new models to stimulate the e-books market, and do all this in a managed environment.
Why the project
- The demand for core reading e-books by taught course students in higher education is not being met
- Publishers are nervous about licensing these e-books through the library and making them free at the point of use due to a lack of evidence about demand and concerns over impacts on print sales
- JISC Collections, publishers, librarians and e-books aggregators are unsure about what the most realistic and sustainable pricing and licensing models are for providing students with access to e-books
Reports from the DLA study
- Findings from the first user survey - over 20,000 responses by UK HE students and teaching staff
- Analysis of the free text fields from the first user survey - what do students think are the advantages of e-books?
Project aims
- License a collection of online core reading materials that are highly relevant to UK higher education taught course students in four discipline areas:
- Business and Management studies
- Engineering
- Medicine (not mental health or nursing)
- Media Studies
- Achieve a high level of participation in the project by making the e-books available on the bidders own platform (where appropriate) and on a variety of e-book aggregator platforms. Higher education institutions will thus have the option to access the e-books on platforms they already use and which are familiar to their users.
- Evaluate the use of the e-books through deep log analysis and to asses the impact of the ‘free at the point of use’ e-books upon publishers, aggregators and libraries.
- Transfer knowledge acquired in the project to publishers, aggregators and libraries to help stimulate an e-books market that has appropriate business and licensing models
This is a 
funded project and reports to the JISC content services committee