Last week I got an email from ebrary as a followup to their recent survey on ebook usage. The following paragraph caught my eye (emphasis mine),
Some of the results were surprising. For instance, patron awareness of e-books has not increased over the last three years and reported usage of e-books has not increased significantly either. What’s more interesting is that the survey results were a direct contradiction of ebrary’s internal usage statistics that show skyrocketing usage of e-books. This contradiction produced interesting discussion between the presenters and audience at Charleston. The leading hypothesis that emerged from the discussion is that students do not realize, or simply do not care, if they are in an e-book or another format, such as a journal, which led to underreporting of e-book usage.
Here's a link to my October, 2006! post where I suggested the same thing: Just what am I looking at?
I didn't get any responses to my question then, but maybe now? What do you think – are students aware of just what it is they're using online? Does it matter to anyone but the vendor?
Comments
2 Responses to “That’s what I said! (student awareness of ebook usage)”
“The leading hypothesis that emerged from the discussion is that students do not realize, or simply do not care, if they are in an e-book or another format…”
Nice, Ebrary – way to represent your market in a respectful way. Yes, I know when I’m using an ebook. Yes, I often avoid them because the reading format – online or a tedious DRM-heavy download – is too buggy and too dependent on being tethered to a desktop computer with internet access. Yes, I know when I’m using a journal article. No, I do not like the way you talk about students.
The sky-rocketing numbers of use – are those correlated to the actual time spent in the book, or are they also recording clickt-throughs that may last thirty seconds or less?
I will, at times, actively avoid using an ebook format when I have a choice (have you ever tried to cite a reference when the physical page numbers aren’t recorded and the pagination on the book changes every time you adjust the font?).
Sigh. I’m a heavy user of Ebrary, and it is better than most academic ebook providers. But I do wish they’d be more responsive (and perhaps move to an Overdrive model for book borrowing).
I think it is possible that students sometimes don’t know. In health sciences, people very seldom read books; they refer to them. So if you’re using a finding tool that gets you into an e-book chapter that tells you what you need to know, do you really stop to think that you’ve just used an e-book, or do you think of it as a web tool? And I find, increasingly, that sometimes I don’t know myself. In health sciences, we subscribe to a resource called UpToDate, a quick reference tool for doctors. It’s not marketed as a book, it doesn’t exist in print form, but it’s very book-like; a sort of Physicians’ Desk Reference type of tool. We also subscribe to things like the 5-Minute Pediatric Consult, which has been around in book form forever, but the e version contains videos of doctors doing actual clinical exams. Is that still a book? And then there are collections like the Canadian Health Research Collection, which contains traditionally published books, as well as government reports that can run 300 pages; are those books? I don’t think the boundaries are always clear cut.