E‐books in practice: the librarian's perspective

Abstract

It has become unimaginable to provide information – particularly scientific information – without e‐books. They have become part of today's combination of media, which includes printed books and journals, e‐journals, e‐books, and databases. When e‐books first appeared on the market, librarians very quickly formulated their key requirements. The most important requirement is functionality: it must be possible to look through a book chapter by chapter, and also to get a quick overview of a comprehensive monograph. Usage arrangements, including concurrent usage and use for interlibrary loans, are also important. The use of uniform technical standards increases the acceptance of e‐books.

Perspectives on E-books from Instructors and Students in the Social Sciences

“…2 Connaway and Wicht reviewed literature about e-books that was published between 2000 and 2007 and noted that, several themes consistently appear in the literature on the barriers to the adoption and integration of e-books into library collections, services, and systems. These include the lack of e-book and hardware standards; incompatible rights and operability; unrealistic price, purchase, and access models; and limited discovery and delivery options.…”

Public library use of free e-resources

“…There has been little formal evaluation on the use of free electronic resource use by libraries, and much of the discussion in the literature has focused on academic libraries' use of ebooks (see -Soules 2009, Connoway and Wicht 2007, Hutton 2008, Perrone 2009, Rodzvilla 2009, Ball 2009, Tedd 2005. The few public library perspectives focus mainly on subscription ebooks (see -Duncan 2010, Currie and Iacobucci 2010, Dierks 2010 Beall (2009) examined the University of Michigan's partnership with Google Books to digitize and create MARC records for over 100,000 public domain items.…”

Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 67

“…. "the only journals that were subscribed to in print were those journals that offered absolutely no electronic access" (Ball, 2009); the assumption must be that this also applied to books. By 2007 a staggering 36 per cent of the acquisition budget was allocated to e-books.…”