Image: Johan Larsson |
Higher education e-books are nothing like the slick and
highly successful e-book Kindle model. They’re clunky DRM-laden
PDFs, sold from publisher to aggregator to library with a series of constantly changing
business models. They’re just about tolerable for users to read on a PC screen
but close to useless on any other device (phone? Tablet? Good
luck trying). But students seem to be OK with them, preferring reading a bad
online version for free rather than spending €50-€70 on their own print copy.
The publishers know this, and they’re terrified. They thought a dual model of
print and online was sustainable but its killing them, and they’re backing out:
either refusing to sell e-versions to libraries or hiking the prices and
restricting the access terms to make them less attractive.
So where are we going? Nobody knows, but there have been
some interesting suggestions, such as a Spotify for e-books.
Here’s what I think – in five years, libraries will have no role in handling
the Big Undergrad Textbook – venerable beasts like Sociology
by Giddens. If publishers don’t adapt and start selling online very widely
and very cheaply, someone else will. The Big Textbooks are easy kill for
ambitious startups, people like Flatworld
Knowledge and OpenStax, who provide very readable
access to more generic undergrad content across all platforms for free or
close-to-free. Students will soon access this content direct – there’s no need
for libraries here.
With most other book content, like more specialised
textbooks, supplementary readings and research monographs, I think we’re on
safer ground. A lot needs to change here – publishers needs to provide better
interfaces and better business models and we libraries need to be willing to negotiate a fair price for this. But can publishers survive on
all these titles with much smaller demand, without the Big Textbook cash cows?
I just don’t know. Will we also see the
rise in the university press for e-books, or radical redefinitions of what
we think of as books? Perhaps, but maybe not in the short term.
While we’re slowly getting there with the e-textbook, one
medium that’s crying out for online delivery is the dusty, discipline-specific
reference book. Students should, but don’t use them - (mention of them in my classes meets
blank-faced silence – worse than PowerPoint slides of Boolean Venn diagrams).
But publishers don’t know what to do with them online. A massive, once-off purchase? An annual
subscription? In any attempts I’ve made to move online with them, publishers
have replied with some jaw-dropping ten-fold price increases from the print
version. And even if I went for it, would students use them instead of
Wikpedia? I’m not sure.
We shouldn’t waste a good crisis. So what can librarians do,
short of becoming publishers ourselves? One area we need to do better in is
liaison with lecturers in sourcing texts. Instead of taking the lecturers title
request and making guesstimates on projected demand (3 e-book copies, 5 short
loan print copies etc.), we need to work with them to try to figure out how to
get (1) the best quality texts at (2)
reasonable prices and (3) all with 24/7 access across all platforms for all
students and (4) trying to do all this across all modules. It’s a very tall
order, but if should be very interesting seeing if we can do it.
*Thanks to my colleagues Miriam Corcoran and Mary Kiely for their advice in researching this.
Thanks Jack. Some very interesting ideas - I do agree we may be moving away from the traditional print undergrad textbook as we know it, which is no bad thing for libraries in my view. For one, it will free up some staffing resources and the space for libraries to develop the more unique aspects of their collections. As well as the developments with commercial ebooks, there is also the increasing emergence of open access book publishing (still some way behind it's periodical cousin obviously). Add OERs and MOOCS into the mix and who knows what 1st year reading lists of the future will look like!
ReplyDeleteAmazon's recent bid for the rights to resell ebooks adds a further dimension - particularly for the textbook market I imagine. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/24/ebook-publishing-amazon - another development worth watching perhaps.
Institutions should be aiming to facilitate optimum online access to core texts and even if libraries are not directly buying and managing access, we should still play an important role in other areas like policy - deciding formats, deciding whether money should be spent directly by students or come from their fees, negotiating purchase terms if necessary etc.
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