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2009 Librarian eBook Survey Released
March 12, 2010 | 7:30 am
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By Paul Biba
The executive summary of the survey says:
The most important features are simplicity and ease of use, then integration with the OPAC, while issues like notetaking and compatability with ereaders are down on the lists
Librarians find ebooks through book vendors and content bundles, while users discover ebooks via the catalog and Internet search engines, as welll as the library web site
The preferred format for now is PDF, though that will change with technology (“Don’t know” was in second rank, well ahead of full-text HTML)
What hinders ebook use? Digital rights management, or DRM
The most acceptable business model is purchase with perpetual access, though other very different models can be acceptable
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Comments:
What libraries don’t seem to understand is that sure, PDF may be the most popular format, but things have changed and PDF is no longer needed at the library unless PDF is the only format for a given book (audiobooks do not count here). ADE is needed to read the PDF and ePub. ePub is better overall because it allows the books to be read on any computer supporting ADE and standalone readers such as Sony Readers, nook, iRex and others. PDF is not good on most standalone readers. So libraries buying PDF because of this obsolete survey is bad for business. It just gets some of us upset that a book we want to read we cannot because it doesn’t work well with our readers and there is a version that does yet the library bought the wrong format and won’t buy yet another copy to fix this mistake.
Overdrive needs to stop proving PDF where an ePub edition exists. This would solve the problem and make thing better for everyone.
This survey was taken by mostly academic librarians, who prefer pdf because students require page numbers in order to cite the information in papers. With pdf you get the exact page image that you would in a paper book or journal.
Here’s a discussion on how to cite a Kindle: http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/how-do-i-cite-a-kindle.html
One suggestion that was made: use the “search inside the book” feature in Amazon to get a page number! Poor kids. Maybe someday the rules of citation will fit the reality of electronic resources.