Once again, the Charleston Conference did not disappoint. The theme this year was “The Best of Times…The Worst of Times.” After reading the first line of the Against the Grain article “eBooks in Academic Health Sciences Libraries” by Elizabeth Lorbeer and Nicole Mitchell, I would have thought for sure “The Worst of Times.” It said “Many of today’s library users no longer prefer the traditional print textbook.” Uh, oh. As a medical book distributor, it might sound like a death sentence, but in reality it is just something we need to accept and adapt to, which is why we partnered with ebrary and continue to redefine our role as not just a distributor of books, but of information, no matter what the format.
If you don’t already subscribe to Against the Grain, I would highly recommend it. The November issue is focused on trends in health science and biomedical sciences content. There are some great articles in this issue like “Trends in Consumers’ Health Information Needs and Expectations” by Patricia Pinkowski, “eBooks in Health Sciences Circa 2008—What Have We Got for Our Journey Now?” by Meg White, the article mentioned in the first paragraph and “Preparing to Honor the Past in the Future: Collection Development in the History of the Health Sciences.”
We attended a lot of sessions during the conference, but I will only highlight on a few…
The first day of the conference started with Pat Schroeder (President & CEO, Association of American Publishers) discussing “News from the Publishing World.” The main news of the day was the Google Settlement. She said it was the most complicated lawsuit she has ever seen. I can understand why since the authors filed a class action suit and the publishers filed a copyright suit. It is an incredible project that opens up 7 million books to the public.
I always look forward to the Health Science Lively Lunch and this year was no different. The session was titled “eBook Intelligence: the 8th Annual Health Sciences Lively Lunch.” As the program abstract states “the session will examine various facets of eBooks and eBook acquisition and collection management specifically for health sciences librarians. We heard from a publisher (American Psychiatric Publishing), acquisitions librarian (Deborah Ruck), and a Licensing/Contract specialist who is a librarian and attorney (Sandra Wenner).
Pam Harley from the APP spoke first. I loved the fact that she commented on why there is a lack of “top tier” titles available as ebooks and/or why the publishers take so long to make them available as ebooks once the print becomes available. A couple of the reasons I wrote down said 1. that fact is not universally true, 2. the title might be a course adoption title. That is so true. As a medical book distributor and reseller to bookstores, we are very familiar with the term “course adoption.” This is a publisher’s bread and butter. They have people dedicated to meeting with instructors to try to get them to adopt their title for their course. If it was available as an ebook right away, why would they need to buy the print? As Pam matter of factly stated “digital pennies don’t add up to print dollars.”
Deborah Ruck from MCW was next to speak about ebooks from a collection development standpoint. She stated that they have 9 collections of ebook and print usage continues to drop. Her biggest gripe about ebooks is that usage statistics are not uniform. You can’t use your own system like with print, you have to go into each ebook resource. Maybe with the developments of SUSHI , Deborah won’t have to do that for much longer.
Sandra Wenner from Rush University spoke about contracting and licensing of ebooks. The main thing I remember her saying is give yourself enough time to read the contract then reread it and read it again. Make sure you ask all your questions before you sign the contract and don’t be afraid to ask for changes. She had a great handout of resources on the subject along with a licensing checklist.
Someone spoke up at the discussion end of the session and said there is a need for a Books in Print of ebooks. Wouldn’t that be great? You don’t really need Books in Print anymore because of the Internet, but I don’t think you could say the same for ebooks. It would be nice to have a searchable list of all the ebooks available from all the different publishers and aggregators.
My other favorite session was “Expanding the Ebooks Buying Experience: Approval Plans.” This is something we want to do with our ebrary titles soon, so I was interested to hear how others are doing with it. The general consensus was that it was going well. It was helping them streamline the process for acquisition and availability of ebooks so they could expend money quickly and focus on specific subject areas. The problems were the platforms, DRM, duplication, scope and MARC records. They also felt there were not enough relevant titles b/c only single user available, they liked their vendor’s slips, and liked that they could buy title by title instead of collection of ebooks. Another library made the step because of further mainstreaming and acceptance of ebooks, embedded discovery, return on investment and collecting to own. A challenge was knowing the availability of both the print and ebook at point of initial decision.
The vendor for both the universities discussed some considerations. For example, are you buying on Format (P or E) or both? Are you focusing on specific subject areas (humanities, science) or other formats such as pictorial works, reference works, collection of essays. Some issues with the ebook in approval plans is the timing of the P versus E, price of P versus E and how to deliver ebooks: aggregator or publisher direct, one or multiple aggregators.
These are all things that we will be considering when we start to integrate ebooks into our approval plans. We will also discuss with each of our approval plan customers how/if they would like to move forward with this.
As usual, I came back from the conference fired up, energized and ready to report and integrate what I learned. Then, I opened my inbox and two weeks later, here we are. I am excited about ebooks and our partnership with ebrary. I heard a lot of griping about the cost of ebooks and why are they so much more than the print? The main thing is, it isn’t the print. You are getting so much more. I think you have to look at ebooks and pick an aggregator the same way you do your health sciences vendor. What can they do for me? We all sell the same thing, but it is our services and what we do with that product that makes us different and better.
