Medical eBook Publishing Trends Webinar Summary

Today I attended the MLA webinar on e-books, 2011 Medical eBook Publishing Trends, sponsored by Ovid. My notes are below.

Moderator, Mark Funk, Weill Cornell Medical Library

Panelists:

Deb Blecic, University of Illinois, Chicago Liz Lorbeer, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences Jennie Stewart, Wiley-Blackwell Dan Doody, Doody Enterprises

The current environment – Mark set the stage with some statistics on the popularity of eBooks. He discussed the digitization Waves in libraires, citing ebooks as the 4th wave.  abs/ins, ref tools, ejournals were the first 3 waves.

Why are ebooks more difficult?  Mark believes it’s in the final deliverable product.  The final product is much more complex to produce than a journal article.  It has more editing, illustrations, authors are paid, and individual sales to students are important to publishers for revenue.  All of these factors lead to a higher cost for the ebook than a journal article.

Deb Blecic -

purchase or rent access, with many options to do this.  Publisher vs. Aggregator, cost models, DRM, packages vs. single title.  Deb feels the DRM are better when buying from publishers. Rentals – multiple options are available here as well.  Common model for textbooks, rental is current edition and edition changes mid-semester. Market is very fluid. Options are in a state of change including whether a book is available via publisher or aggregator.  not all books are available in e format. Consider the platform and DRM, what will serve users the best?  E sometimes comes out later than P – buy twice? pay twice?  Some ebook content is missing or has extra content Optimize Access – 24/7 point-of-need, multiple users, no loss/damage, allow F/T searching and some on devices. ILL is often prohibited or if allowed, implementation is difficult.  Preservation is an issue. Moving forward? we want to search f/t for all library ebooks, no missing content, reasonable purchase models, reasonable DRM, preservation, ILL, etc.  We need to be proactive in shaping the future for our patrons.

Liz Lorbeer – PDA

PDA – no obligation browse period; find desired content and browse prior to purchase A trigger is used to purchase the book – based on the time in book, print, copy, pages viewed, etc. unmediated or mediated – up to library to set this up.

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