JISC national e-books observatory project

JISC Collections has been awarded captial funding to undertake an innovtive e-books project. The 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.

The project aims to:

1. license a collection of online core reading materials that are highly relevant to UK HE taught course students in four discipline areas:
Business and Management studies
Engineering
Medicine (not mental health or nursing)
Media Studies

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

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