Ebooks is such a massive subject these days, and has brought significant changes to my job in Book Acquisitions. When I first started in this department several years ago, the policies were focussed on how many print copies to buy based on the number of students, demand for the title, and destined location (i.e. the main library collection vs short loan) With the advent of ebooks, purchasing issues are a lot more complicated. While there is a huge benefit to the fact that the purchasing model need no longer be restricted to one book borrowed by one student at a time, but rather one ebook available simultaneously to many students, this is offset by licensing restrictions, variable costs and terms depending on supplier, and pilot schemes such as Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA). PDA is when a number of ebook titles in a particular subject area are selected at the beginning of the trial period and only purchased following an agreed number of patron views, the idea being that our stock is then driven by what students are actually using. This can be very tricky to predict successfully, though, and in at least one case used up the entire ebook budget for one academic library in the first month.
Although I’m very interested in new technology, ebook readers have consistently remained out of my price range, but I’ll also admit that I’m not particularly drawn to spending the money due to my love of printed books and also the various issues regarding format compatability and ownership – when I purchase a print book, at least I don’t have to worry it’ll disappear from my shelf without warning! A friend of mine who writes for the MmITS blog wrote an article last year in praise of ebook readers and suggested that print has had it’s day. My argument has always been that there is room for both, and I put forward my own counter-argument. In saying that, I read with interest David Vinjamuri’s article ‘The Wrong War Over Ebooks – Publishers vs. Libraries’ and I really believe that public libraries must have the chance to lend ebooks to library users with e-readers, otherwise libraries may be taken out of the equation altogether.
Leigh 2.0 