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By a TeleRead Contributor

erik christopher.jpegIn the world of eBooks we have two separate areas; the leisure-reading crowd and the higher ed crowd, many similarities but also many, many differences. Since I work in the Higher Ed arena, let’s focus on that and talk about the needs of patrons and what is out there to meet those needs. These platforms as well it should be noted are hosted platforms for eBooks, meaning internet access and the Aggregator hosts the eBooks and library is accessing that way, just want to clear that up. This is an overview of the eBook platforms and how they work, not a procurement or collection development piece, those alone are articles within themselves.

Aggregators

First off we have the aggregators, in Higher Ed there are three main platforms out there that provide content to libraries. EBL (eBook Library), ebrary and Myilibrary, they all have content and they all have a different platform as well to provide access to that content. Each of these platforms connect with roughly 450 publishers for their content, many of them the same.

EBL: EBL is an Australian based company, owned by Ebooks.com. EBL is skinned over adobe technology, which is a strength and a weakness

ebrary: ebrary is based in California. Ebrary has control over their own software suite, which is also a strength and a weakness

Myilibrary: MIL is owned by Ingram and is part of Ingram Digital or also known as Ingram Content Group. MyiLibrary is the only aggregator with the power of a print distributor and print-on-demand service.Content

In regards to content for each of the platforms you have some commonalities and some areas of difference. For instance, roughly 90% of the content on all three platforms is the same, that’s a big number, but not necessarily a bad thing. This demonstrates that the publishers are committed to using multiple platforms to host their content. This offers a benefit to the consumer by limiting the risk of being locked into any single platform. However, a mechanism of transferring content from one platform to another has yet to be devised. Just as a mention, the difference for some of that overlapping content though can be single user and multi-user models, more on that later. For the roughly 10% of content that is different and unique, this like all numbers fluctuates monthly as publishers are added or content changes. The aggregators are all adding around 2-3k titles per month to their platforms.

EBL: The 10% of content that is unique is their Australian content, being based there and owned by an Australian company, this is obvious. They provide access to their eBooks in a couple of different ways, they have a perpetual access model, you buy it you own it and they have what is called a patron driven model, the patrons help decide on what is purchased by the library to be added to the collection.

ebrary: The bulk of their unique10% is a collection of content called Cartographica. Ebrary also offers unique content that they digitize for institutions and then sell on behalf of the copyright holder through other channels. Access to their eBooks is done a couple of different ways; they have perpetual access and they also provide a subscription model to eBooks. This can be done on a package/subject level or a large collection model also known as Academic Complete, roughly 44k titles and a total of around 150k titles.

MIL: Their 10% that is unique are their computer science and IT materials from a publisher called IGI Global. They also offer perpetual access to ebooks and a patron driven approach and their total title count is around 200k. They are quicker to add more eBooks to their platform being that Ingram has long standing relationships of many of these publishers.

The best way to think of eBooks is as just another format, the content is the same as the print; it’s the format that has changed. Historically, students/patrons are accepting of such change. Think of e-journals, they have multiple platforms for the journals and each publisher presents theirs in a unique way with features and options, but the core content is still the same.

Editor’s note: Erik Christopher worked in K-12 Educational Sales as publishers rep for many years, recently working as the Digital Services Sales Manager in higher ed, specializing in eBooks and electronic resources from a variety of publishers. This is the first of a two part article. PB

 
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