Academic libraries seem to have a fatal attraction for e-book package deals. These very expensive packages eat up budgets and threaten to shrink collections. Having looked at how these deal don’t work for readers I thought I’d look in more detail at how they don’t work for libraries either. E-book packages, where publishers sell libraries all their titles at once rather than allowing them to purchase title by title, make money from more than just the obvious way. Not only can providers inflate sales of obscure titles by adding them to packages, they can also inflate prices by...

The world of academic libraries and scholarly publishers works much differently from the rest of the e-book world. But the access model it eventually adopts could point the way to a very unfriendly future for all e-book consumers, especially those who value genuine ownership of books. Toward the downside? In my last post I told how academic libraries have found themselves with large collections of e-books that, since they cannot be viewed on e-readers and smart phones, remain largely unread. Now used for searching rather than reading, these e-book collections stand to be made redundant by Google's more familiar interface and brand. But as...

Dan D'Agostino, our newest contributor, is collection development librarian at a large research library. He has a particular interest in how new technology is impacting libraries. Although not a techie, he's the happy owner of a Sony PRS-505 that he's especially grateful for on crowded commutes. Welcome, Dan! – D.R. Over the past several years, university libraries have collectively built very large and very expensive collections of e-books that nobody reads.  These collections, often including the very best and highest demand academic titles, not only remain unread but may in format already be obsolete. They may never be read. Instead of focusing...