Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users provides readers with a view of the changing and emerging roles of electronic books in higher education. The three main sections contain contributions by experts in the publisher/vendor arena, as well as by librarians who report on both the challenges of offering and managing e-books and on the issues surrounding patron use of e-books. The case study section offers perspectives from seven different sizes and types of libraries whose librarians describe innovative and thought-provoking projects involving e-books.
Read about perspectives on e-books from organizations as diverse as a commercial publisher and an association press. Learn about the viewpoint of a jobber. Find out about the e-book challenges facing librarians, such as the quest to control costs in the patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) model, how to solve the dilemma of resource sharing with e-books, and how to manage PDA in the consortial environment. See what patron use of e-books reveals about reading habits and disciplinary differences.
Finally, in the case study section, discover how to promote scholarly e-books, how to manage an e-reader checkout program, and how one library replaced most of its print collection with e-books. These and other examples illustrate how innovative librarians use e-books to enhance users’ experiences with scholarly works.
Foreword, by Roger Schonfeld
Introduction to Academic E-Books, by Suzanne M. Ward, Robert S. Freeman, and Judith M. Nixon
Publishers’ and Vendors’ Products and Services
1 An Industry Perspective: Publishing in the Digital Age, by Nadine Vassallo
2 The Journey Beyond Print: Perspectives of a Commercial Publisher in the Academic Market, by Rhonda Herman
3 Production, Marketing, and Legal Challenges: The University Press Perspective on E-Books in Libraries, by Tony Sanfilippo
4 Delivering American Society for Microbiology E-Books to Libraries, by Christine B. Charlip
5 Platform Diving: A Day in the Life of an Academic E-Book Aggregator, by Bob Nardini
Librarians’ Challenges
6 University of California, Merced: Primarily an Electronic Library, by Jim Dooley
7 Patron-Driven Acquisitions: Assessing and Sustaining a Long-Term PDA E-Book Program, by Karen S. Fischer
8 Use and Cost Analysis of E-Books: Patron-Driven Acquisitions Plan vs. Librarian-Selected Titles, by Suzanne M. Ward and Rebecca A. Richardson
9 E-Books Across the Consortium: Reflections and Lessons From a Three-Year DDA Experiment at the Orbis Cascade Alliance, by Kathleen Carlisle Fountain
10 The Simplest Explanation: Occam’s Reader and the Future of Interlibrary Loan and E-Books, by Ryan Litsey, Kenny Ketner, Joni Blake, and Anne McKee
11 Developing a Global E-Book Collection: An Exploratory Study, by Dracine Hodges
Users’ Experiences
12 A Social Scientist Uses E-Books for Research and in the Classroom, by Ann Marie Clark
13 The User Experience of E-Books in Academic Libraries: Perception, Discovery, and Use, by Tao Zhang and Xi Niu
14 E-Book Reading Practices in Different Subject Areas: An Exploratory Log Analysis, by Robert S. Freeman and E. Stewart Saunders
15 Library E-Book Platforms Are Broken: Let’s Fix Them, by Joelle Thomas and Galadriel Chilton
Case Studies
16 A Balancing Act: Promoting Canadian Scholarly E-Books While Controlling User Access, by Ravit H. David
17 Of Euripides and E-Books: The Digital Future and Our Hybrid Present, by Lidia Uziel, Laureen Esser, and Matthew Connor Sullivan
18 Transitioning to E-Books at a Medium-Sized Academic Library: Challenges and Opportunities—A Feasibility Study of a Psychology Collection, by Aiping Chen-Gaffey
19 E-Books and a Distance Education Program: A Library’s Failure Rate in Supplying Course Readings for One Program, by Judith M. Nixon
20 Mobile Access to Academic E-Book Content: A Ryerson Investigation, by Naomi Eichenlaub and Josephine Choi
21 E-Reader Checkout Program, by Vincci Kwong and Susan Thomas
22 Out With the Print and in With the E-Book: A Case Study in Mass Replacement of a Print Collection, by Stephen Maher and Neil Romanosky
Epilogue, by Michael Levine-Clark
Contributors
Index
