Only got a chance this AM to skim this article from Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services, Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2005,
Pages 71-81. Electronic or print books: Which are used? (non-proxied link to Science Direct).
The authors describe a study done at Louisiana State University where they compared the usage of books that were held both in print and through netLibrary and found that overall, print was used more than the electronic version of a title, but they offer some caveats and suggestions about how to interpret that result. Distance Education was mentioned only in passing. I remember seeing some statistics about eBook usage here at the U of C and they showed some similar trends. A lot of the eBooks never were used, but some of them were used dozens, if not hundreds of times! Tough to get that much usage out of a single print copy, eh? As the authors of the article point out, there’s no way of knowing if the whole eBook was read, or if it was just a chapter or less that was really used, but they also remind us that we don’t know that information about traditional paper book usage either.
Comments
2 Responses to “Electronic or print books: Which are used?”
Eventually, I hope netLibrary’s statistics section will be a little more savy. I work am the liaison librarian to our Graduate school of Education. They have a lot of distance/ online classes. Our promotion of E Books has been working and they do get used a lot. I kind of see E books sort of as reserve readings. Most of the check out periods are 4 or 24 hours so I doubt people are reading the entire text….at least in one sitting. We do share with MINITEX the Minnesota library information network. Pretty much the entire state. Gives us a lot of titles we would not be able to afford, but also includes a lot of popular titles as well. I just did our statistics on popular titles for the last 2 years. Number 2 was the “Idiots guide to teh Beatles”. The good news was that was about the only popular title in the top 50.
Kristofer, one of the things I really dislike about netLibrary is the counter-intuitive “loan period”. It makes so little sense in a digital world to operate this way, IMHO! We just picked up a subscription to ebrary, which allows any number of folks to view a title simultaneously, and with no loan periods – you might want to give it a look-see. It’s too new for me to have any experience with what kind of statistics they supply – any readers want to chime in with their experiences?