Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
thing is that these figures are likely soft, and the true market performance
of e-books is probably stronger given that this data is for the US only'
(Eltham, 2009).
One exciting new development which may very well impact on the
availability of books for library users is the Espresso Book Machine
(EBM). This is a print-on-demand machine that takes a PDF file and
prints, collates, covers and binds it as a single paperback book in a
matter of minutes. The machine is designed for the library and
bookstore marketplace, and the first one was installed in the New York
Public Library in 2007. The first one in the UK was launched in 2009
at Blackwell bookstore in Oxford: 'signalling the end, says Blackwell,
to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print,
or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books'
(Flood, 2009) (and this will increase to over a million by the end of
2009).
Clearly, publishers see the growing demand from libraries for e-books
and, as can seen from the above statistics, many are now providing both
their current titles and back catalogues in e-format. They are also
responding to the student and consumer demand for e-books to be read
on mobile devices such as the Sony e-book reader, Amazon's Kindle and
now the iPhone.
However, there is one category of e-book which publishers still remain
reluctant to make available: that is the e-textbook.
In the UK, the JISC E-Books Working Group - which oversees e-book
consortia activity - has been in repeated dialogue with publishers to
persuade them to make their e-textbooks available to libraries - but to
little avail. Publishers' overriding concern is that if they allow libraries to
make e-textbooks available, the student market for textbooks will decline
significantly. So, in 2007 funding was obtained to undertake an
ambitious project, the National E-Book Observatory Project (JISC,
2007) - which would make high-demand reading-list texts free at the
point of use to all students in the UK for a period of two years and
monitor the use of those titles and the impact on publishers' sales. The
key findings from the project were highly insightful. Students used the
e-textbooks in huge numbers at all times of the day and night, rarely
reading linearly, but skimming and dipping into the content; most
reading was done on screen. However, the most significant findings
were that the availability of the e-textbook did not impact upon the
