Academic E-Books : Publishers, Librarians, and Users

Abstract

One of the great scholarly publishing success stories of the past decades has been the systematic transition from print to electronic that major academic publishers and libraries alike have conducted for scholarly journals. We tend to focus on the limitations of this transition, such as bundled pricing models and challenges such as smaller publishers still clinging to print or richly illustrated titles that do not always display well in digital formats. At the same time, the overall transition has been remarkably orderly and responsible, yielding meaningful improvements in discovery and access. Compared with journals, the possibility of a format transition for books presents a different set of opportunities, and far greater complexity, for academic libraries and publishers alike. In this book, contributors review some of the exciting initiatives that are being mounted in an effort to incorporate e-books into library acquisition, discovery, and access channels. As has been the case for e-journals, we are developing institutional licensing models, allowing for the creation of library "collections" of e-books often spread across a variety of platforms. Although publishers try to retain the revenues associated with heavily used materials, libraries seek to manage expenditures by maintaining sharing models and responding to community demand with greater sophistication. Even if e-books are growing unevenly, libraries and content providers can take much satisfaction in the progress that has been made to introduce this valuable new format for books.

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“…The models of single user access and multiple users access dominate libraries' access to e-Books (Civic Agenda 2012;IFLA 2017). While it is fortunate that most academic and research libraries typically adopt the model of multi-user simultaneous access to e-Books, public libraries commonly apply the model of single user access or a limited number of users' access to e-Books (Xu and Moreno 2014;Ward, Freeman, and Nixon 2015). In the circumstances where only single user access or a limited number of users' access is available, e-Books may not be able to cater to the demand of numerous patrons or students looking for the same material simultaneously.…”