Understanding e-books and information behaviours

A typically well-attended e-book seminar on day one of the London Book Fair (LBF) raised some poignant questions on e-book growth. Speakers this year were familiar faces such as David Nicholas, Director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London (UCL), Sage Publishing’s Rolf Janke, and Mark Carden from MyiLibrary, more of that later.

When I blogged on last year’s LBF e-book seminar, the talk was of tipping points and a greater increase of e-book activity. Over the last 12 months we have certainly seen that from publishers who continue to march on with a plethora of digitisation initiatives and deals. Then there is the publishing of research from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) of which Nicholas played a key part. This came in the form of the joint British Library/JISC report on “Information behaviour of the researcher of the future”.

These changing research behaviours include horizontal, not vertical methods of searching by the ‘Google generation’ or viewing but not reading, onscreen sources of information. Both should be considered when thinking about e-books, learning and the library.

Nicholas opened his presentation by discussing the JISC National e-Books Observatory Survey, one of the biggest studies of its kind in the world. This ongoing research has seen the placement of a range of e-textbooks into 120 UK universities. Once the study has run for two years expect the wealth of e-book user information to raise some interesting findings.

Nicholas made some pretty honest points on what he thought needed to be considered. Users want ‘quick information wins’ they want to ‘bounce from one source to the other’ and ‘power browse’. e-Books, he said appeal to people wanting a bit of a book – not all of it, and everyone is just waking up to this”.

While e-books are supposed to circumvent the traditional logistic problems of supplying each student with their core textbooks, Nicholas asked what happens when students get all their content this way. What does that mean for the library? Will they even need to come to the library anymore?

Before I attempt to answer that, I should point out that the publishers presentations by both Janke and Carden had something to offer on this dilemma, albeit from their point of view.

Janke admitted how end-users; both faculty and students, will go to Google and Wikipedia first for information rather than the library and therefore e-books. His problem as a publisher was to ask, how you get them to your content.

There was talk of various initiatives, business models and marketing plans, which all involved the library and publisher making efforts in the attempt to address this. Both Janke and Carden admit that librarians complain of too many pricing models and collections, although in the experience of both, a one size fits all approach won’t be right for librarians either. As Jenke pointed out, “Librarians say they aren’t there to market publisher’s content” 

That’s interesting because as was said more than once during the seminar, users don’t care who the publisher is.

With e-books continuing to grow in popularity among both scholars and publishers the traditional academic library will face the challenges into how it works and what it should be there for. The way learning and the processing of information happens among scholarly circles has changed and will continue to do so.

There may be hard questions to ask about what the physical as well as virtual nature of academic libraries should be and could mean some big changes. But as Nicholas points out we have “seen a frightening dumbing down of information seeking”. There is a significant and serious role for the library still to play in all this. If there was ever a need for information professionals to take a leading role addressing these issues, the time is now.