As someone who has never used a Kindle, Nook, or tablet, the notion of an “e-book” has perplexed me for sometime. I couldn’t fathom the idea of libraries “checking out” digital files to patrons. How? Through what platform? Do you have to come into the library to check it out? Do you have to return it? While I still have not engaged in the process of checking out an e-book myself, many of my questions have been answered either directly through things we’ve discussed in class, or via other related discussions. For example, DRM certainly answers some questions about how publishers work to protect their e-books from being shared freely amongst people.
Despite my lack of personal experience using e-books (except on computers), I will not deny that they have rapidly become important, and that perhaps even for some, the preferred method of reading. Because of this interest and use in e-books, academic libraries have already created e-book collections for their patrons and this is creating special challenges for the library in different ways, one of them being financially. In this respect, especially when viewing it from a collection development standpoint, e-book purchasing and licensing seem to share some of the pitfalls of database licensing. As someone who aspires to eventually work in subject specific collection development, there are two major things which jump out at me.
First, there is the issue of the e-book version of the “Big Deal.” It seems that some vendors and/or publishers want to sell you more e-books than you actually need, so they will package some good titles with some not-so-good titles just to give the illusion that they are offering you a great discount. A discount it may very well be, but it forces libraries to make purchases for lots of books which end up potentially being more work than they’re worth (in terms of cataloging, etc.) and gets the library to spend its money on things it truly doesn’t need!
The flip side to this scourge of vendor pricing, and my second point, is that usage of e-books needs to be monitored very closely to order to find out how those e-books are being used, if at all. Given that the use and popularity of e-books is still fairly recent, I’m not sure this means that all the e-books we have are getting the usage we think they are. We should be looking for trends in usage. Perhaps e-books are only popular in certain subject areas, or perhaps only certain types of e-books are getting used (e.g. reference books vs. textbooks, etc.). Knowing specific details about how our e-book collections are being used can be vital to informing future decisions about where the librarian will choose to spend his or her budget.
No comments:
Post a Comment