JISC national e-books observatory project

At the UKSG conference this year there was a session on e-books and libraries. It was excellent to see that many of the initial findings from the JISC national e-books observatory project echo the findings from Warren Holder’s study at the University of Toronto.

The findings from the observatory show very sharp peaks of use of the e-books during the academic year and at specific times of the day. The current DRM systems assume that use is spread evenly throughout the year. DRM systems need to be developed (or removed) in recognition of real user behaviour. Platforms should offer unlimited concurrency.

Access is another important issue for e-books, especially with so much use taking place off campus. Students told us in the surveys that 24/7 access was one of the key benefits of e-books. Publishers and aggregators must join the UK Access Management Federation to ensure single sign-on and fast simple access.

The behaviour of students using the e-books is non linear with the majority of students dipping in and out of the e-book rather than reading the whole chapter. Session times on the MyiLibrary platform were around 13 minutes with 8 pages being viewed in that time. 85% of users were spent less than one minute reading a page. This was similar to the findings at the University of Toronto and shows that some very fast power browsing is happening. It also indicates that if a student wants to read in a consistent or linear way, they will use the print. E-books are for ‘just in time’ and remote use, students are not over consuming the e-book.

The study has found that the platform is not as important as providers think it is, students are going directly into the e-books via links from the OPAC or from the library website. As Holder’s study has found, users don’t go to e-book platform as a starting point, they are found in a multiplicity of ways with web searches and the library catalogue being the most frequent. To help ensure that uses can easily find the e-books they require, the University of Toronto is integrating new discovery tools such as book covers and tables of contents into the catalogue. This is an advantage of locally loaded e-books but the results have been phenomenal with the book cover images receiving the second highest amount of hits across the whole library website. Publishers and aggregators should focus on providing the quality metadata to ensure discoverability in the places where staff and students go to find out what’s available.

The focus groups confirmed that rather than e-books supplementing the print, e-books are seen as a way of easing the pressure on short loan collections and dealing with the high peaks of demand. This suggests that course text e-books and e-textbooks will co-exist with print.

Indeed this was back up by the analysis of the impact on the print sales that indicated that making course text e-books freely available through the library is not a threat to print sales revenue. Many of the print versions of the e-books made available through the Observatory project actually increased their sales against what was expected. So just as the librarians say, students are using e-books in addition to the print they have bought or borrowed; they co-exist.

What does this mean? Not only should new models for e-books reflect the uneven use of e-books but publishers should harness the chance to grow a new market.

Presentation on the JISC national e-books observatory given at UKSG

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