E-books

Compiled by: Chris Armstrong, Consultant & Trainer lisqual@cix.co.uk and Ray Lonsdale, Consultant, Trainer, Reader in Information Studies, Aberystwyth University rel@aber.ac.uk, December 2011 

What is an e-book?

There have been many attempts to define the term over the last 10-14 years, and initially the debate was clouded by an association of the e-book itself with the e-book reader. Now, definitions concentrate on two essentials: that the e-book is intended for reading on a screen - e-books are not simply a delivery mechanism, and that what is being read is essentially “book-like”. Our definition was published in 2008:

“Any content that is recognisably ‘book-like’, regardless of size, origin or composition, but excluding serial publications, made available electronically for reference or reading on any device (handheld or desk-bound) that includes a screen.“                      Armstrong, 2008

Brief history of e-books

1970s Free e-books publishing began as text archives with initiatives such as the Gutenberg Project in North America. Later other archives developed such as that at the University of Virginia and the Oxford Text Archive. In this guise free e-books are commonly digitised versions of printed works.

1980s This decade witnessed the emergence and development of commercial e-book publishing, dominated by the North American university presses. To help address the spiralling costs of publishing printed academic monographs, these publishers turned to electronic publishing. Although the vast majority of titles were digitised versions of print texts, a small number of original e-books were being created also.

1990s Following on, we saw the proliferation of electronic fiction publishing in North America (largely made available for early e-book readers), and during this decade e-reference publishing also took off, and one singular initiative was the emergence of integrated reference collections such as Oxford Reference Online and Credo Reference. A major new approach complementing individual e-publishers were aggregations of e-book titles from many publishers made available by commercial companies such as NetLibrary (now eBooks on EBSCOhost) or Questia.

2000 onwards  A major stimulus to e-book publishing within the UK was the formation of a new national, strategic body - JISC e-Book Working Group, which was charged with helping to create a critical mass of relevant titles for the HE and FE sectors, and to promote take up and usage of e-books within those sectors. During the subsequent years there has been an increase in e-textbook publishing (the subject of a 2008-9 project – the JISC National E-books Observatory http://observatory.jiscebooks.org/), and a significant development in publishing for other sectors such as schools and children’s libraries, and the public library service. The aggregator, OverDrive focus on public libraries as does Askews. Other library supplier such as Dawsons and Ingrams MyiLibrary are more focussed on the academic sector. Increasingly, a diverging range of works are now being digitised, including report literature, reading schemes and study guides. Many aggregators are now talking about eContent and aggregated collections of e-books have semi-integrated but apparently randomly selected video clips, audio clips, journal off-prints, etc. included. Another important development has been the creation of free digital libraries such as the International Children’s Digital Library, which are acting as a stimulus to multi-lingual e-book publishing.

Characteristics of e-books

Are e-books just electronic versions of print books?

Many, in fact the majority of, e-books encountered in libraries, are digitized versions of print-on-paper originals. However, increasingly electronic-only or ‘born-digital’ books are being developed, e.g. City Sites in the table available on the Web-version of this Fact Sheet. There is also a separate Fact Sheet on ‘Social e-Books’.

Do e-books offer more than plain text?

Where page images or facsimiles are presented, or in some text archives (such as Gutenberg) all that is available is a representation of the original text with its images. Most publishers and aggregators add considerably more value, and allow full-text searching (often of the collection, as well as of individual books), an integrated dictionary, citation help (or export), a live index as well as a table of contents that is expandable to sections, external links, and the ability to bookmark, highlight and note take online. These are all essentially interface- (easy) rather than book-based (difficult to add) enhancements.

What is the difference between free, purchased and licensed e-books?

Free e-books may not have a publisher’s imprimatur, and consequently may lack in quality and authority, suffer from pop-up or in-page advertising, and may be restricted to out-of-copyright editions. Purchased e-books are frequently intended for personal use, may have limited functionality and a limited selection of titles. Licensed e-books are normally targeted at library use (although see below under the question on personal/library use), offer a whole uniform collection with a single interface with considerable functionality, may allow virtual lending and/or collection building and Patron Driven Acquisistion (see e.g., EBL or MyiLibrary), and – depending on licence terms – multi-user access.

What is the difference between a publisher and an aggregator?

Publishers (e.g. Taylor & Francis or Penguin) make e-books available that have been produced in-house, usually, originally as a paper book. Aggregators (e.g. EBSCOhost or Credo) acquire the rights to lists of titles from any number of publishers – probably never the complete publisher’s list – and bring together subject collections of titles from a range of publishers using a single interface. An aggregator may have as many as 300,000 titles available from up to 18,000 publishers; libraries normally licence subsets of the whole.

How can e-books be read?

As most e-books are available online, they can be read on PCs and workstations, hand-held computers and PDAs, tablets, laptops, and even on mobile phones (e.g. Safari offer Bookbag for the iPhone), as well as on e-book readers. Not all e-books are available for all of these, sometimes because of the software used and sometimes because of software or licence restrictions. In general, it is true to say that libraries have not yet engaged with e-book readers – mostly due to licensing restrictions (publishers are not keen to allow lending to e-book readers but many aggregators have taken this onboard e.g. Dawsonera or OverDrive). Public Libraries are very keen to do so and many have succeeded using OverDrive; many publishers have serious concerns about this kind of lending.

What e-book readers are available?

The current generation of readers all use eInk technology, which requires very little battery power and produces a near-print-on-paper reading experience. Around about a dozen readers are available from the Sony Reader to the Amazon Kindle or the Apple iPad (for comparisons see http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix or http://rapidcitylibraryebooks.weebly.com/index.html).

What is the difference between licensing a single e-book and an e-book collection?

Apart from the cost, collections offer a greater added value. Whether made available by a publisher (e.g. OUP: Oxford Reference Collection) or an aggregator such as Questia, collections will usually allow searching across the whole collection (or parts of it), tools such as a dictionary or the ability to create student books, and a single reading interface.

What is the difference between e-books for personal use or library use?

Some products are made available for individuals, either for purchase as in the case of novels from Internet bookshops, or by the hour/day/month/quarter/annual subscriptions of Questia, CengageBrain, VitalSource, etc). Other products, such as the reference collections made available by Knovel, KnowUK, Credo or Oxford; collections such as Oxford Scholarship Online; or subject collections made available by aggregators such as EBSCOhost or ebrary are clearly targeted at libraries, although the latter offers personal subscriptions as well. The collections of free titles and the text archives available on the Web, can clearly be used by anyone (see Armstrong, 2011).

Armstrong, Chris (2011) The 2011 Guide to Free or Nearly-Free e-Books. London: UKeiG. xv+161 pages. Available via Lulu from http://www.ukeig.org.uk/content/publications

Armstrong, Chris (2011) Writings about e-book publishing, 2011. Available at: http://www.i-a-l.co.uk/resource_ebook2011.html

Armstrong, Chris (2008) Books in a virtual world: The evolution of the e-book and its lexicon. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science 40 (3): 193-206.

Publishers, Bookshops and Aggregators

The following table is not comprehensive, but offers initial contact with a range of e-book sources and suppliers (URLs checked 02/03/2011). For a more comprehensive annotated listing of free e-book sources please see our Publications page at: http://www.ukeig.org.uk/content/publications

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