ebookevaluation

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Discoverability

Discoverability through your own Discovery tool or especially Google could have a large impact on whether books get used. (I am hoping to test this statistically.) Oefelein cites the Ithaka Faculty Survey from 2015 that says faculty 83% see the library’s role as “buyer” as being important, whereas only 58% see the role of “gateway’ as important. Furthermore, at SpringerLink (where he works) half of all traffic is coming through search engines, and only 20% through library services (A&I services as well as the catalog, I guess the discovery layer, too?). He recommends questions librarians should ask of vendors: “ a librarian might ask ‘Is the content indexed by Google and professional discovery services?’ or ‘Is the content marked up in semantic micro-data so that Google can machine read it?’”

Faherty’s study (I only read the exec summary) was a small set of interviews with humanities scholars. They use Google for unknown-item searches, but not Google Scholar or Google Books. For known items they might use Amazon or the library catalog. The catalog is not for discovery. In fact, there is a lot of frustration with library catalogs (p.22) even for known items. For unknowns it is just not used.

Faherty brings up Search Engine Optimization (p.43), but I don’t know what it would entails or whether/how it is different from using semantic mark-up or making things Google-able.

Faherty’s study also comments on difficulty in finding chapters in edited works, which people want to be able to search and use as stand-alone entities. This has to do with metadata, but again, I don’t know specifics. Previewing a book (like in Amazon or Google Books) does not work as well for chapters.

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Interface features

Lamothe cites a survey saying that users really like being able to search within the full-text, several studies on see see p.109

Another study says people really want to be able to download as PDF (Lamothe also p.109) I’m sure this is true.

Hobbs and Klare found students saw print books as more interactive. They could put sticky notes, physically sort piles of materials, highlight or annotate. With e-books, “most students typically looked only for basic features ... rather than seek out menu options... This occurred whether the students were completely new to e-books or had indicated they already had extensive prior experience using e-books.” p.14 They had to be prompted to use (or even look for) the search feature. The copy-paste feature was very hard to find and non-standard, i.e. you couldn’t just highlight text and hit ctrl+c. Students were not interested in downloading citations, even when this tool was pointed out to them. Having to hit a > arrow to go to the next page annoyed students. They wanted to be able to scroll down. Also noted too much space taken up by menus, the space left for the book on the page was small. Icons were generally hard to interpret. Some platforms require you to log in, or even create an account, in order to use certain features such as highlighting. This is silly. Nobody wanted to create a new account.

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e-Reference

Lamothe says it is well documented that users do like to use e-books for reference, but we are less sure about monographs. Suggests we need to view reference and monographs as two different e-book collections.

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Meaning of E-book Stats

Cox suggests that highly concentrated e-book use (i.e. lots of people reading the same thing) means it is required or recommended reading, whereas more dispersed use is likely supplementary reading.

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Reasons users don’t like e-books

Slater 2010 - navigation is difficult. Restrictions on printing. cites Gunter 2005 who found 56% of respondents said they just don’t like reading long texts on computer screens. A 2009 study said the same, people want print for more extensive reading.

Pros of e-books (see Slater 2010) were search capability, remote access (though access is less if you don’t have constant Internet access or can’t download)

Users expect them to work like e-journals, but they don’t. You can’t download and print the whole thing. Clicking to turn a page can be annoying.

printing is restricted. Cox p.200

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Comparisons between different purchase models

Slater compared NetLibrary and Safari. The latter was locally selected and the former a consortial purchase. Also, they measure use differently, as Safari provides access in chunks that are shorter than a chapter. (not sure what netLibrary does)

Amy Fry looked at this, too.

Carrico et al compared different kinds of perpetual access purchases: publisher packages, DDA, and individual firm orders. All the DDAs get used, which makes the comparison odd. I also figured there would be other differences between the books besides their purchase methods, as they might be from different publishers or on different platforms. They looked at four publisher packages: Springer, Oxford, Rittenhouse, Morgan & Claypool. Broke down by broad discipline. In publisher packages, medical books had a much higher average number of uses per book than the others (Does R2 count usage differently? This could be a confounding factor.)

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Ideas for my future studies

would it be possible to use Levine-Clark’s measure of time spent in book, Knowlton’s difference in PEU, and see if there is a correlation between amount of time spent in book and degree of preference for print? Would I want to use only books that were not reference? Need to see which vendors have a report that actually shows time spent per session; this would be a proprietary report.

Levine-Clark also looks at pages printed per session. That would be interesting to look at as well.

Could look at O’Reilly books and see which we own in print and online. Do we still get Safari? I think so.

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Ways of measuring e-book use

Levine-Clark’s report (Global Trends) mentions six ways of measuring usage. Some don’t seem relevant to my questions, others I am not sure why they tell us. Semi-useful ones are:

Percentage of titles that were used.

How much gets used in an average session?

usage of the most popular titles (I don’t get why people look at this)

Percentage of titles used compared with extent of use (are a few titles used a lot, many titles used a little)

Lamonthe tests the Pearson’s correlation coefficient between searches and views. It’s very high (0.9), which I suppose means that people are accessing books through the platform itself rather than the catalogue. Not sure. He says it implies you can use searches as a metric just as well as views. What is the point of that?

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Which subjects more popular in print, which in electronic?

Christianson and Aucoin took the top 10% of most-used titles in each format, then collected subject headings for these, then tallied which subjects came up most often in each format. Would make more sense to count every time a book was used, rather than counting each book once. They also give a caveat that a subject might not be high in the usage stats because they don’t have many books on that subject. But it was a paired list of titles, so a subject would be equally non-represented in both formats.

Slater 2009, not surprisingly, finds history and language/linguistics favor print, but also education and biology. Sciences, technology, math, and engineering preferred online, as well as media and communications. This is by comparing PEU between netLibrary and print collections.

Slater 2010 says we should not assume differences in print and electronic use are due to how users are using a book (i.e., print for extensive reading, e-books for quick look-up). There’s a bit of research showing print usage isn’t always extensive either.

Slater 2010 says if the differences between subjects are due to different users and their ability to adopt new technologies, we would expect the differences between disciplines to decline over time. But if the differences are due to different information needs in different disciplines, the disparity would remain.

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fields to include in report

see Goodwin p.102 on including fields like author and publisher as confirmation fields. (an e-book and print book often have titles listed slightly differently, as I found, particularly the subtitles)

Knowlton mentions including fields like ISBN that would help with VLOOKUP.

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problems with e-book use measurements

mainly it’s the issue of “extensive use,” as this is more equivalent to checking out a book v just browsing to see if it looks useful.

The issue of EBL’s “landing page” (I think it was Levine-Clark who mentioned this), which lets you view the table of contents without clicking into the book, whereas other platforms don’t have that.

Did you buy it as a package or select title-by-title? Or is it DDA? Levine-Clark in Global Trends says that a higher percentage of EBL books get used than ebrary, because “libraries typically have smaller and more carefully curated collections of EBL titles” p.12

If someone downloads, we lose all information on how many pages they viewed, how much time they spent reading, whether they returned to it multiple times.

do your e-book platforms limit simultaneous users?

You really can’t compare uses-per-book across vendors. My own research found a huge difference in how vendors count downloads, which correlates with a corresponding difference in the number of uses per book.

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problems with circulation as a measurement

in-house use of print does not get counted, whereas a similar activity for an e-book would (i.e. flipping through to decide if you want to read it). Post-checkout you might use a book a lot and it only counts as one use, whereas for e-books each time you open it gets counted.

Different checkout periods for different users really mess up the stats as a true measure of use.

Remember to check if a book has been out for years. Circulation may be low because the book is actually not available.

Slater 2010 cites a study from 1986 with interviews of how people use print books. Their study found that 60% of interviewees said they read 10% or less of a book they check out, and 77% said they read “small parts” of books. He also mentions than Christianson and Aucoin where among the first to question the assumption that a print checkout implies extensive reading. It might just mean skimming or reading bits.

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how many books used v how heavily are they used

see Knowlton who thinks the difference is negligible, what matters is only whether it gets used or doesn’t.

Levine-Clark wants to measure both things separately for e-books, though it seems like only the former could be used in a comparison to print.

Slater 2009 looks at concentration of use. E-book use will probably look more concentrated than print use because for print we don’t know how many times each user referred to a book while they had it checked out. I’m not clear what numbers he is comparing. I might say to look at what percentage of the books account for 10% of use, or 50% of use. Slater also asks what percentage of used books were only used once (for netLibrary and equivalent print titles).

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proprietary vendor reports

vendor reports might tell you: call number, time spent in the book, number of pages with sections copied(!), number of pages printed. Levine-Clark says this, and it is unclear what vendor his is talking about, ebrary or EBL.

EBL reports would differentiate distinct users, so you’d know how many different people viewed a book. This could be very comparable to checkouts, if you look at distinct users per month, or whatever your standard checkout period is.

Goodwin talks about Duke reports (though they changed recently, right?), where she was able to see how many pages were viewed per book and discarded books with fewer than 11 page views. Not that much rationale for why she picked this threshold. Also, even if twelve pages were viewed, you don’t know if twelve people glanced at it and decided not to read or one person read several pages.

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Subject patterns, global findings

Levine-Clark’s study of 600,000+ titles from ebrary and EBL held by libraries worldwide. Surprisingly, STEM had the smallest percentage of titles used - 50.20% of available STEM titles used in ebrary compared to 63.84% of available social sci titles and 59.47% of available humanities. In EBL the order was similar - highest percentage of social sciences titles used (73.99%), 67.36% of humanities titles and 67.36% of STEM.

However, STEM titles seem to have the most page views per session and arts and humanities the least. This surprises me, as I would expect humanities books to be more long-form text that you’d have to read, whereas with STEM you might look at just one graph. Hmm, yet contradictorily, STEM uses spend less time in the book than humanities users. How is this possible? They read more slowly?

History had the largest number of page views per session and spent long periods of time viewing the book. This seems like a use for which print might be preferred. [my add] Technology had many page views per session but little time in the book. Levine-Clark suggests they are skimming and flipping through for specific information they need. [more like Reference, I guess. I would expect this to be a use type for which electronic is helpful.] Fine Arts also looks at a lot of pages but doesn’t spend a lot of time per page. He doesn’t give numbers for these observations, but they are interesting.

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intro quotes

“It would seem that any solution to the collection of accurate and representative data on e-book usage will be time-consuming and resource-hungry, to the extent that it may be a prohibitively expensive exercise.” Wilkin and Underwood p15

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user preferences

Wilkin and Underwood say that some people don’t worry much about preference since users are willing to use their less-preferred format if that’s what is available. Perhaps instead we should be studying cognitive effects of reading online, such as whether it affects comprehensive and memory of the material. p.15. Hobbs and Clare p.10 has some citations related to this in their lit review - effect of e-books on learning.

Hobbs and Klare similarly find that people prefer print but are willing to use electronic. Awareness of e-books was increasing over time, but preference for print was not shifting.

Knowlton says it is a “common finding” that user preferences vary according to what the purpose of their reading is - i.e. print for extensive close reading and e-books for quick look-up. I didn’t not link-chase, as his citations were rather old, though I think this claim is still true.

To figure out if users prefer print or electronic, Knowlton subtracted the PEU for e-books from the PEU for print. (actually, he subtracted the lower from the higher, rather than allowing negative values to indicate preference for e) This also answers the question of “Do users not like e-books, or do they just not use books?” see p.27

The make-up of a department might also affect whether users prefer e-books. For instance, Knowlton quotes somebody who says doctoral students like e-books more than undergraduates. p.31.

Cox mentions a study by Hernon, Hopper, et al 2007 at Simmons that observed students working in real-time, asking them to think aloud about what they were doing.