Cost Differentials between E-Books and Print in Academic Libraries

Abstract

. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Samantha McNeilly of the AUM Library for her careful review and comments upon an earlier draft of this work. © 2015 Timothy P. Bailey, Amanda L. Scott, and Rickey D. Best. Academic libraries continue to face funding pressures compounded by the need to provide students with access to electronic resources, both in journal and book formats. With space constraints and the need to repurpose library space to other uses, libraries must carefully examine the move to e-only formats for books to determine if the format makes reasonable economic sense.A survey conducted at Auburn University at Montgomery (AUM) has confirmed for academic libraries the work of Gray and Copeland on e-books being more expensive than print for public libraries. For AUM, the mean cost for an e-book is significantly higher than for the print counterpart of that title. The cost differentials between the two formats show e-books as being consistently higher than print in initial price. This consistency holds true across all LC classifications, regardless of whether or not the title is published by a university press or a commercial press. uburn University at Montgomery (AUM) is a regional, doctoral level V institution as defined by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. The institution has a student enrollment of approximately 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students and offers 34 undergraduate and 25 graduate degree programs.Due to space constraints, the continued growth of the AUM Library's collections has been challenged. In an attempt to address this challenge, the library is considering altering the book selection process to favor e-books over print. The library has a history of using e-books, having subscribed to all of the netLibrary collections (now EBSCO e-books) and the ACLS Humanities collections. The library has also recently licensed access to Springer e-books collections. These collections were purchased or licensed as a group of titles and did not require individual selection for titles. Library emphasis has been to rely upon the e-book version of specific titles and to avoid duplicating those in print.

A comparative study of medical ebook and print book prices

“…Table 2 shows both the mean ebook cost divided by the mean print book cost (the ratio of the two means, a measure which has previously been used in some studies (Harwell, 2017; Walters, 2013)), and the mean of the ebook price to print book price ratio, which seems to have been used by some others (Bailey et al, 2015). The latter measure is the one used for the bulk of the calculations in this paper, since it is the price differential for the formats of individual titles (not the differential averaged over all titles) that is of primary interest here.…”

“…Medical books were not part of this study. Bailey, Scott and Best (2015) found that in their study of 264 ebook titles, the mean print price was $53.50, while the mean ebook price was $73.50, with a mean difference of $19.17. Their study included only 13 titles in the Library of Congress ‘R’ class (Medicine); for these, the mean price differential was $42.81, with a mean print price of $58.66 and a mean ebook price of $87.14 (for some titles, an electronic version was not available; in these cases, the print book price for these titles was still used to calculate the mean print book price).…”

Transitioning to 100% Business E-Books: The Case of a Large University Business Collection

“…In some instances, there are wide variations in pricing which can add up to 500% to the book cost. In a survey at Auburn University at Montgomery, the differential of print to electronic was $19.17 in favor of the electronic copy (Bailey, 2015). A few publishers, such as Oxford University Press, charge unrealistic prices for the electronic version of print.…”

Students’ Information Needs and Digital Technologies in Academic Libraries

“…The cost of resources is yet another aspect and comparison research carried out by Auburn University of Montgomery showed that it is significantly more expensive to purchase the electronic version of a given document than a printed copy of one (Bailey & Scott, & Best, 2015).…”

“…The analysis of the way users read, searched for information or selected books showed that the most common manner of interacting with the book were short sessions aimed at finding particular information (Zhang & Niu & Promann, 2017). Other issues addressed by research included the connection between the use of e-books and academic marks -high level of e-book use translated to good marks (Soria & Fransen & Nackerud, 2017), as well as the cost of electronic books in relation to their printed versions (Bailey et al, 2015).…”