DROP in library e-book spending growth?
Is the growth of library e-book spending slowing down?
If you go by a report based on stats from 75 academic, public and special libraries, it is. But, yes, spending is still growing rapidly. Just not as fast. Sorry, I don’t have the stats.
See Friends of the Albany Public Library blog and Primary Research group site (scroll down).
One of the main barriers to library use of e-books is that patrons don’t know as much about E as about P. I suspect that DRM and eBabel complexities are major factors here.
Popularity: 2% [?]
May 9th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
It’s a question of short-term/long-term thinking coupled with ease of use. Overdrive is fairly easy for audiobooks, but for e-books, it is much more complicated. It ends up being a much smaller group than audiobook users. It’s that tower of e-babel thing. Too much dealing with Adobe Reader’s functionality to transfer a device. If it is any help, my library is putting more money into the service for next year. However, most libraries will have difficulty doing this with the economy.