Academic publishers less keen on standalone e-books than trade houses: Libraries love aggregated e-content
By Liza Daly of threepress.org
"Three miles of books"—that’s the caption on a Flickr photo of a Blackwell’s bookstore.
Someday could the books all be online? Imagine working on your thesis at the beach. Just how much progress are academic publishers and university libraries making? Here in the States, at least, many trade publishers are buzzing about the Kindle. Academic publishers, however, along with their library customers, are not quite as excited about Kindle-style e-books yet despite growing interest in digital works.
Leaders beyond the Kindle realm
But in many ways the academic houses been the real leaders in delivering other kinds of online content, whether as standalone product databases or as part of library aggregators. Universities see E as a way to fight the growing costs of academic journals and, yes, books, too. One study of academic, public and special libraries showed that only 25 percent of library spending on e-books was with individual publishers, while close to 70 percent was with aggregators.
Such thoughts come to mind not only from various statistics but also from the time I spent on May 29 at the "Going Large with E-Books" seminar at the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston. Despite the name, e-books in the usual sense were just part of the agenda.
Two different strategies but a common skepticism of DRM
Life-science publisher CABI recommended starting small and diversifying with multiple platforms where feasible. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers chose a single vendor that could deliver online features like subscription-based access and full-text search, but also provide a print-on-demand service. Both presenters stressed that DRM was something to be avoided or at least made unobtrusive.
Outside academic publishing, Allen Noren of O’Reilly Media presented a high-level view of the company’s online content offerings, including e-books. Disclaimer: I write for O’Reilly but do not work for it.
Curiously, Noren did not stress that O’Reilly e-books (in PDF format) are DRM-free, but did emphasize their repackagability and flexibility, two traits that come in handy for the Safari service. In a TeleBlog comment, Tim O’Reilly (photo) has described Safari as "our third largest reseller, behind only Amazon and Barnes & Noble."
For some titles, users can choose to buy only relevant chapters, download whole e-books, or read content online—or, naturally, continue to buy print editions.
Island-style books not as urgent for academic publishers
So e-books as portable, discrete entities aren’t quite as urgent for academic publishers as they are for trade publishers, but that could change as device adoption spreads. The Kindle already comes with the Oxford American Dictionary installed, and Oxford University Press has enjoyed good sales of Kindle books. It will be interesting to see if the rigorous scholarly products which began appearing in digital format with CD-ROMs in the 80’s and 90’s—and are now online behind institutional subscriptions—can migrate to e-book devices.
Very large, search-intensive applications may never be able to live on e-readers, but always-on wireless devices like the Kindle certainly could access them remotely. Marrying touchscreens and e-ink with rich online content databases could be quite attractive to college students who’ve dreamed of working on their theses from the beach.
Moderator’s note: Blame moi, not Liza, for the misidentification of the book room mentioned in the post’s lead (based on the Flickr caption). The photo is of a bookstore, not a library, and I’ve made a correction. - D.R.
Image credits: First photo CC-licensed from RTPeat. Second licensed from Del Far.
June 6th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Lisa — maybe you know this, but some of your readers may not realise that the photo is of the underground ‘Norrington room’ in Blackwells academic bookshop. Its where they have a lot of science, social science, philosophy and theology books. Its a fabulous bookshop but not part of the university. Less than 100 yards away (as a mole would burrow) there is also 8 floors (maybe 9?) of underground stacks where the Bodleian keeps a lot of its books. That is a dark and mysterious place where no readers are allowed.
June 6th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hi, Adam. Liza and I appreciate the catch. I’m the sinner, not L., and I’ve changed the text. Sure wish that Flickr caption had been more helpful. The things I learn! Once again, my thanks for helping us get this right. I encourage TeleBlog readers to write in with error reports like yours. The idea isn’t to come across as infallible—I’m not!—but to present The Facts as best we can. David
June 17th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
[...] TeleRead, I discussed some observations about the adoption of e-books by academic (rather than trade) [...]