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 | Ebooks Gain at Libraries, but Lack of Awareness Remains an Issue
A survey of libraries done by ebook vendor eBrary found that, while ebooks have become more popular, growth is being slowed by several issues, including complicated interfaces, business models, and a general lack of awareness among students and faculty. According to Allen McKiel, director of libraries at Northeastern State University (Tahlequah, OK), who reviewed the survey results for eBrary, three broad issues emerged from the study: the "the intertwined relationship between print and electronic" combined with "the complexity of e-marketing models" has exacerbated an "already tense relationship" between libraries and publishers; that "ebook collections and research tools are not well understood by a significant percentage of faculty and students;" and that "a growing percentage of libraries are participating in the distribution of e-content."
The survey shows that ebooks are now widely adopted, with 88 percent of libraries saying they own or subscribe to ebooks and nearly half saying they have more than access to more 10,000. Usage, however, is another issue. Only six percent of respondents said ebook usage was excellent, compared to 22 percent who said usage was poor. Most students use ebooks via the library catalog, but "low use of the catalog" was not seen as an issue. Instead, librarians said the major inhibitors of ebook use was "lack of awareness," followed by difficulty in reading them, difficult-to-use platforms, and lack of training. "There is a lack of understanding of the strength of the research nature of the ebook collection," McKiel observed, saying that instruction is key and students will become more receptive when as they gain awareness of the tools ebooks provide, such keyword searching. McKiel also reiterated a long-held belief: patrons so far still prefer reading print books. He pointed to another well-discussed inhibitor to students' ever reading ebooks "cover-to-cover": the lack of a suitable, commonly available reading device.
Aside from student attitudes, it's clear that publishers face a number of additional challenges with libraries on the business side. Respondents said "price" was their primary concern in purchasing ebooks, followed by "content," and expressed a strong preference not to duplicate print and ebooks in their collections. Restrictions like a "single-user" model was a third concern, which McKiel viewed as both a price and content issue, noting that using technology to "artificially restrict access" was counterintuitive to librarians' desire to use technology to increase access. A "modest majority (56 percent) of librarians said that they were either already digitizing their own content or considering it, which suggests that libraries are "cutting their teeth on a publishing role for their institutions," even though mostly in special collections or for "internal use" at this juncture.
The survey was conducted by eBrary this spring to "better understand the digital content needs of the library community." The survey was completed by 552 individual libraries, the majority of which (77 percent) were academic. The full results of the survey are not yet publicly available.
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SPARC Honors Father/Son Team with Innovator Award
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom—a father and son team—as SPARC Innovators for their research and support of open access initiatives. Ted Bergstrom, an economist, chairs the economics department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Carl Bergstrom is a theoretical and evolutionary biologist in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. To librarians, however, the Bergstroms are best known for collaborating on Ted Bergstrom's journal pricing web pages and on the Eigenfactor.org web site produced at Carl Bergstrom's research lab. The SPARC Innovator program recognizes "advances in scholarly communication realized by an individual, institution, or group." Previous winners include Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Institute; the University of California; and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Innovators are selected by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.
Ted Bergstrom says his activism in scholarly communication issues got started more or less accidentally: "I was doing more refereeing than I could possibly do and I needed a way to sort out which journals I'd work for, so I decided on a whim to list them by price per article and work down the list as far as I could go." What he found, he said, "surprised and infuriated" him. "The numbers showed that large commercial publishers "were getting free work from us and looting our university budgets." Bergstom began "collecting hard statistics" in the late 1990s, and says the numbers he tracked backed up his initial impressions. He later shared his findings with son Carl, then a graduate student. "My father first tipped me off to price differences among journals," Carl Bergstrom recalled. "I was already a strong proponent of open source software, and so limited access to research results did not make any sense to me."
It's clear father and son influence each other's work. Carl Bergstrom recently launched the Eigenfactor web site recently, aimed to identify the "most influential scientific journals" based on citations in Thompson Scientific's Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as well as other journals, books, newspapers, and other reference items. Carl Bergstrom says Eigenfactor hopes to rank journals not unlike the way Google ranks web pages. "We iteratively calculate the importance of each journal in the citation network by a simple mathematical algorithm," he said.
Ted Bergstrom, meanwhile, would like to use the data from Eigenfactor.org to create tools that for libraries to do use in purchasing journals: "It seems important that libraries start digging in their heels and refusing to subscribe to overpriced journals." He visualizes a tool that would maximize spending based on weighted citations, a tool he sees as especially useful in the era of bundled journal packages. "It's hard for libraries to figure out if bundles are better values than individual journals, because there's often so much in a bundle that libraries won't ever need."
To read the Bergstroms' unabridged Innovator profile, visit the SPARC web site.
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| Reed Elsevier Says It Will Exit Defense Exhibits Business
Under pressure from the scientific and medial professions, as well as internal pressure, Reed Elsevier said this week that it will exit the defense exhibitions business by the second half of 2007. "Over the last year or so it has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors, particularly in the science and medical markets, have very real concerns with our involvement in this sector," explained Reed Elsevier CEO Crispin Davis. "We have listened closely to these concerns."
In 2006, the science and medical communities began urging Reed Elsevier to abandon its business operating defense fairs, believing the business "incompatible with the aims of the science and medical communities." Those concerns were also largely shared internally by employees, Davis said, leading to management's decision to divest after its obligations end in the coming months. The decision was met with praise. The group CAAT (Campaign Against the Arms Trade) which organized a strong campaign to end Reed Elsevier's involvement with arms fairs said it "welcomes the decision and applauds the board of Reed Elsevier for recognizing the concerns" of its stakeholders. "They've listened to their customers, to their authors, and to their own staff, added Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, in a statement to The Scientist. "I praise them for doing it."
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| The Heist: At BEA, MacMillan CEO Richard Charkin Swipes Google's Laptops
If you needed another example of how frustrated publishers are with Google's Library Program, look no further than MacMillan CEO Richard Charkin's blog. Last Saturday, at the BookExpo America (BEA) conference in New York's Javits Convention Center, Charkin and a colleague swiped two laptops from Google's booth and documented the whole crazy caper in a post labeled "The Heist." "I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour." Charkin documented the whole stunt with pictures.
What motivated Charkin's "appalling piece of criminal behavior?" The owner of the computer "had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so." Charkin's point? "That his act of theft "is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property," he wrote. "If you don't tell us we may not digitize something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall." Charkin "felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google, but said that they "should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers."
Not quite, intellectual property experts might argue, noting that physical and intellectual property don't quite function the same way, although some think it should. Google copies the contents of library books in order to include them in a web index. Although this may be objectionable to copyright holders, it nevertheless does not deprive the owner of the physical book (the library) from its future use, unlike removing a piece of hardware, such as a laptop. Perhaps at next year's BEA, Charkin can refine his gesture by bringing a memory stick and copying the laptop's hard drive.
Look for more BEA coverage in Thursday's edition of the LJAN.
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