Library Use of E-Books: 2008-2009 Edition published

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By Paul Biba

This annual report has just been updated and published. You can find the a book review of it in PDF format here.

One of the most interesting findings of the report is that librarians with the biggest budgets (of $4m or more) increased their expenditure on e-books much more in 2006–7 (when the average increase was 35%) than in 2007–8 (when the average increase was 14.2%). Even more markedly, librarians with budgets of between $1.5m and $4m increased their expenditure on e-books by an average of 53.3% between 2006 and 2007, but by an average of just 7.43% between 2007 and 2008. It is interesting to speculate on the reasons for this: a major factor is almost certainly that libraries are approaching saturation point of all the desirable e-book material that is commercially available to them. If publishers want e-book sales to continue to increase, therefore, they may have to bite the bullet on refusing to digitize textbooks because they are afraid of losing print sales – and at the same time find a mutually palatable e-textbook sales model.

Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.

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