21-May-16 | SOAS E-books Workshop | Slide 1

1
(No Transcript)
2
Textbooks wanted

• Libraries are demanding e-text books
• Publishers do not want to sell them
• Why?
• E-books free at the point of use might mean no
  print sales to students

3
What the librarians told us

• Too expensive
• E-book pricing models are not satisfactory (64)
• Not the right type of e-books
• There is too little choice of e-book titles (62)

4
What we are doing

• license collections of e-books that are highly
  relevant
• four discipline areas
• Business and Management studies
• Engineering
• Medicine (not mental health or nursing)
• Media Studies
• evaluate the use of the e-books through deep log
  analysis
• understand user behaviour
• understand the impact of free at the point of use

5
e-books we licensed

• Media studies 7 e-books
• Medical 10 e-books
• Business and Management studies 5 e-books
• Engineering 14 e-books
• 36 e-books in total!
• Is that all?

6
National observatory
MyiLibrary
Ovid
76
47
7
National engagement
12 workshops 250 librarians from 131
institutions
8
Librarians views

• I believe that my library should cover the costs
  to provide students with access to their course
  texts online, free at the point of use.
• 90 of librarians agreed with this statement
• I believe that my library should provide students
  with access to their course texts online, but
  that the costs should be shared between the
  library, the department and the student.
• 7 of librarians agreed with this statement
• I believe that my library should provide students
  with access to their course texts online, but
  that the library should not have to pay and
  students should be charged.
• 3 of librarians agreed with this statement

9
What the study is doing

• Asking users what they think they do
• Analysis of raw server log data finding out what
  users actually do
• Final report what they actually do and what
  libraries and publishers need to do

10
User Survey

• Nationwide coverage
• An initial benchmark of the academic population
  what they think they do
• gt22,437 responses (1 March)
• 123 universities
• 89.1 completion rate
• Representative sample
• Largest e-book survey ever?

11
Findings 1

• Survey confirms bottlenecks in the system
• 21.8 of students dissatisfied or very
  dissatisfied with library provision of printed
  course textbooks
• around half of teachers report regular complaints
  about library provision
• 65.5 in media studies!
• High levels of interest in e-books
• 60 of the academic population is already using
  e-books
• especially popular with men and postgraduate
  students
• Low student content purchasing intentions
• JISC Project texts (only)
• student purchasing intentions appear low (3.1)
• there is much reliance here on library copies
  (35.8)
• multiple readership (sharing with a friend) (40)
• This is not a generalisable finding to all
  e-books.

12
What they say they do

• Screen reading or print
• In spite of a general presumption more than half
  of all users say they read e-books from a screen,
  even in the case of those aged 56-65. Is this is
  a red herring?
• Reading from the screen 62.6 say they read the
  contents of the e-book from the screen
• Only 6.4 say they print it out
• 54.3 students say they dip in and out
• This has big implications for publishers!
• Role of the physical or virtual library
• Physical library 45.2 students go every week
• Virtual library 43.8 student go every week
• Access from outside the campus
• Students and staff, but especially women
  students, value the convenience of being able to
  access library services from home 41.6 access
  the virtual library from home(44.3 female, 36.8
  males)

13
How they say they find the books

• Discovering e-book content
• Catalogue entries and links from the library web
  site are very powerful determinants of e-book
  take-up, as confirmed again here.31 of students
  use the library website23 of students use the
  library catalogue19.3 of students find out
  about the books from their tutorThis is why we
  need good MARC Records and persistent URLs and
  ISBNs for e-books! It needs another
  presentation to tell you about all the issues
  weve discovered about the implementation of
  standards (or the lack of)!

14
Findings so far

• Deep Log Analysis of MyiLibrary
• Some initial findings

15
Type of page viewed all books
16
The changing landscape students

• Power browsing (skimming materials)
• Horizontal research (shallow)
• Bouncing (spending only a few minutes looking
  at materials)
• Behaviour not limited to the so-called Google
  Generation

17
Whats next?

• If we behave differently in the virtual world
  does this impact on our buying behaviour in the
  physical world?
• Do publishers need to make different types of
  books for the virtual world?
• Is it time for a new formula for an electronic
  book?
• Are our behaviours driven by physical capacity
  in the physical world books take up space and it
  is difficult to have lots of books at once they
  are heavy and take up space we are tortoisesIn
  the virtual world we can be caterpillars
  munching through lots of stuff!
• Are we taking lots of redundant structures into
  the virtual world because that is what we learned
  in the physical world?
• Should we have e-books at all or just databases
  of stuff?

18
Thank You!

• Questions?
• All reports and information available at
• www.jiscebooksproject.org