The secret lives of ebooks: A paratextual analysis illuminates a veil of usage statistics

Abstract

This study applies the method of paratextual analysis to six electronic books, or ebooks, in an academic library collection at a small liberal arts college. Two books are selected from each of three platforms: ebrary, EBSCO, and SpringerLink. The characteristics of each book are described, including design and readership, as well as 2 years of usage statistics from the specific library, and altmetrics where available. The paratextual study leads to a closer investigation of the usage statistics themselves and concludes that despite industry standards, they are not calculated consistently across vendor platforms and that while these data are invisible to researchers outside of the library, there are also essential elements that librarians mistakenly take at face value when comparing ebook usage from multiple vendors.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Usage Data

“…This issue of the varying definitions of a section in BR2 reporting has been discussed by Karin Byström 12 and Jonathan H. Harwell and Erin Gallagher. 13 According to the COUNTER 5 documentation, the current TR_B1 does not place more prescriptive requirements on reporting of section requests, but provides "comparable statistics" to the COUNTER 4 BR1 and BR2. 14 Since the purpose of the current study is not to assess or criticize the COUNTER approach to reporting data, the supersession of the BR2 report is not relevant to the discussion at hand.…”