TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

By Dan D'Agostino

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 charging for the amount of use their e-books are predicted to get. They do this through charging by “concurrent users” (cc users); that is, the number of people who can view an e-book at the same time. For example, a charge of 5 cc users would mean that five readers could access the same ebook at the same time.

This method makes a certain sense for popular titles. After all, when a print book gets popular we have to buy more than one copy to meet the demand. But content providers exploit this charge by setting all the titles in an e-book package at the same cc user level – you must pay for the same number of cc users regardless of how obscure a title may be. So, not only do you not get to choose which e-books to buy, you don’t get to choose what cc user level to limit each title at either.

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By Dan D'Agostino

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 some of the astute commenters on the post immediately pointed out, the next generation of tablet/slate devices, should they contain technology that allows the screen to mimic e-paper (a la Pixel Qi), will certainly bring these e-book collections back to life.

If this method of delivering e-books works for scholarly publishers, it can also work for trade publishers and it may come with a significant downside for the consumer.

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By Dan D'Agostino

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 on books downloadable to e-readers or smart phones, academic libraries have created enormous databases of e-books that students and faculty members can be read only on computer screens. The result, as shown by studies like the JISC national ebooks observatory project, is that these collections are used almost exclusively for searching for information—scanning rather than reading.

With a vigorous, searchable Google Books on the horizon, could academic libraries suddenly find themselves and their e-book collections completely bypassed by their students and faculty? The New Year finds both academic libraries and the big commercial publishers that serve the academic community in a state of paralysis, on the one hand knowing that their onscreen e-books are not reaching potential readers and on the other unable to embrace the exploding popularity of e-readers and smart phones as platforms for their content.

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