Universities Expanding Their Adoption of E-Books

In a recent study by the Primary Research Group, sixty-nine percent of university research libraries indicated that they plan to increase spending on e-books over the next two years. The results were based on a survey 75 academic, public and special libraries in countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Japan. This represents a significant shift in a short period of time given that only a year-and-a-half-ago other reports indicated that that e-books were not yet ready for the campus environment. According to the press release and excerpted materials available from Primary Research, other findings of the study include:

• Spending. E-book spending by libraries is growing rapidly in 2008 but by significantly less than in 2007. Libraries in the sample expected to renew over 77% of their current contracts for e-books. Nearly 70% of e-book spending was with aggregators, with 24.6% of total spending with individual publishers.
• Specific materials. More than half of all library users reported either extensive or significant use of e-reference books, and nearly a quarter of college libraries reported use as “quite extensive.” How-to books were used occasionally by about 37% of the libraries, and non-U.S. libraries reported higher use than did U.S.-based libraries. Business books were among the most popular e-books, with nearly 23% of the libraries reporting quite extensive use and another 23% reported significant use. Non-U.S. libraries reported even heavier use. Fiction e-books were not used extensively, with 71% saying that they were used little and fewer than 10% reporting extensive or significant.
• Cataloging. Non-U.S. libraries had MARC records provided by vendors for more than 78% of their e-book holdings. Over 81% of the sample cataloged their e-books and listed them in their online catalogs. The libraries in the sample had MARC records for about 74% of the e-books in their collections. Many of the libraries with the smallest budgets did not have MARC records for their e-books.
• Information Literacy. Nearly half the librarians rated the skills of their users as being less skillful in using e-books than other major e-journal databases, and another half said the skills were about the same. The non-U.S. population rated only 31% as less skillful, while 53% of U.S. librarians rated their users as less skillful.
• Use by discipline. Use of e-books in the hard sciences (chemistry, physics and biology) was particularly high, with more than 30% of participants saying that this use of e-books was quite extensive and another 26% noted significant use.
• Redundancy in print. A print version was maintained by libraries 24% of the reporting libraries.
• Use in course reserves. E-books account for only about 3.9% of the books on course reserve [also known as “short loans”], with a range of 0 to 30%.
• Availability of non-commercial e-books. 45% of the libraries in the sample said that they make special efforts to help users reach assessable free e-book sites such as Project Gutenberg. Nearly 21% of the libraries have digitized out-of-copyright books in their collections and make their contents more available to their patrons.
• E-book statistics. Nearly 80% of libraries said that they used them only occasionally or that they were little used, and only 8% said that they were used quite extensively.
• E-book Readers. The percentage of libraries that own any kind of e-book reading device, not including computer workstations, is very low – only 10%. The U.S. ownership (10.64%) is very similar to the non-U.S. ownership (8.33%). Ironically, except for libraries with the very smallest budgets, there is an inverse relationship between library budgets and percentage of ownership, with only 6.7% of those with budgets exceeding $4 million (USD) owning readers, while ownership was 14.2% with budgets between $300,000 and $1.5 million. Ownership of the Amazon Kindle in particular was only 4.0%.

Another recent study supports some of these conclusions about the potential growth of e-books. Ebrary, an aggregator of e-books, commissioned a study that surveyed 150 college and university libraries throughout the world. While 49% of the respondents overall reported that they never use e-books, and another 28% use e-books less than one hour per week, the use rate is actually higher outside the U.S. than inside. The major reasons for non-use are that students don’t know where to find the books (57%) and they prefer printed books (45%). The most important features of e-books are the ability to download the text to a laptop, to copy and paste text, to print, and to highlight text.

Neither of these studies distinguishes very much between e-reference books versus monographs or trade books. It is also important to watch the development of different e-book reader technologies. In some countries, standard mobile phones are used to read whole novels, and the iPhone seems well-positioned to move into that market. Specialized e-ink based readers, such as the Sony eReader and the Amazon Kindle, are gaining some traction, and the next generation of readers have screens that can be folded or scrolled. For the first time, trade and commercial publishers are making the substantial portion of their front stock available for these specialized readers, and they are also realizing long tail sales of back stock. Greater adoption can be expected as the technology advances and the price for specialized readers continues to drop.

Sources

• Research Libraries Embrace E-Books. The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 30, 2008.
• Library Use of E-Books. Primary Research Group, 2008-09 edition.
• 2008 Global Student E-book Survey. Ebrary.

This page is part of the Environmental Scan, one of NELINET's Planning, Assessment & Accreditation Initiatives.