Have
you seen an e-book for sale on Amazon, asked the library to buy it, and been
told that there is no electronic version of that book available? Are you
looking for an e-book you read a few months ago, but it no longer works? It’s
very annoying – and I can assure you that we in Information Services share your
annoyance. Our policy is that e-books are the way forward. They enable us to
dramatically increase the range and number of titles available to our users, at
reduced cost and with no impact on our limited shelf space. Many (although by
no means all) of our users prefer working with e-books over print, citing the
speed and ease of searching, and the ability to access hundreds of thousands of
titles from anywhere in the world, at any time. But in spite of the undoubted
benefits that e-books bring, there are many problems – and I shall attempt to
summarise these now.
E-book
publishing is a new, complex, and constantly changing field. We try our best to
source e-books whenever they are requested, but sometimes we are simply not able
to. With e-books, it is the publishers who decide the price, licencing terms,
digital rights management, number of simultaneous users, and so on, which
subsequently determines whether we can purchase the book. Most publishers make
their e-books available on aggregator sites (such as ebrary or Dawsonera, the
sites which host the vast majority of our e-books) and can be purchased by
libraries on an institution-wide basis; some publishers do not. Human Kinetics
is one such publisher. They will not
sell to institutions, only to individual users. The reason for this is very
easy to explain: money. They will make more money by selling twenty copies of
the e-book to twenty individual students than they would by selling one copy to
a library that those twenty students could then share.
We
have investigated various ways of informing staff and students of this sort of
limitation, such as maintaining a list of publishers who don’t sell e-books to
institutions, but it is not that straightforward. The e-book licencing
goalposts are constantly shifting, and it is very difficult to manage.
Springer, for example, does not sell individual titles on institution-wide
basis, but they do sell e-book packages
to libraries. OUP is another complicated one; originally its content was
available via Dawsonera, but then two years ago OUP built its own platform
called Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO). We
bought one e-book on OSO; now OUP has removed a lot of the content from that
platform, put all the legal titles onto another new platform (called
LawTrove), which only individuals can access, and put other e-books for sale,
again only to individuals, via Amazon and other third party vendors. Then
there’s Pearson, who do make their
content available to libraries via Dawsonera, but every six months or so change
the licencing terms to make them less favourable (reducing the number of uses
allowed in a year, reducing the number of simultaneous users, removing the
ability to download for offline reading, increasing the price…). It’s not just
Dawsonera that has content withdrawn from it; the titles available to us via
our ebrary subscription change frequently, with hundreds of new titles being
added to, and dozens of titles being removed from, the collection each month.
The sheer scale of the changes makes this difficult to manage, but we are
currently working on a way of supressing the removed titles from the catalogue
and ordering replacement copies if necessary.
The
variety of different platforms, the inconsistency of licence terms from
publisher to publisher, and the fact these terms are in a constant state of
flux, all serve to frustrate and alienate our users. There are limits to what
we can do to change this situation, although we are making some progress: HE
libraries, and JISC, negotiate with publishers en masse to secure
favourable pricing and terms where we can – but these tend to be for large
multi-title packages with the big publishers. Also, JISC has recently written
to Pearson on behalf of all HE institutions to express our collective
displeasure at the way the company is increasingly frustrating our efforts to
offer a decent service to our students. There has been no response from Pearson
yet, but there was no small amount of schadenfreude
in the library a few weeks ago when their share price plummeted and they were
forced to issue a profits warning.
I am confident
that e-books will one day be the best way for academic libraries to deliver
content to their users, but until access is uniformly seamless, reliable, and
cost-effective, e-books are also a source of great frustration for staff and
students. I appreciate that frustration, but can assure you that we feel just
as strongly and we are doing all we can to manage this difficult situation, and
provide our users with the resources they need.
I
hope that this has gone some way to addressing some of the main concerns about
e-books, and provided an explanation for the current situation. If you have any
further questions, or suggestions for how we might improve this service, please
do get in touch with us at ejournals@aber.ac.uk.
I’m Simon French and I’m the Library Graduate Trainee for the 2014/2015 session. The photograph is of me on a literary pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Company in Paris. As you can see, even when I’m on holiday I don’t want to stray too far from the books! 
"In February 2013, Lillian Stevenson, Academic Services Manager and Law Librarian represented the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL) at the Joint Study Institute held at the University of Melbourne, Australia. 