Print book availability from Ebook aggregators
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The document summarizes a study comparing e-book collections from four aggregators to print book purchases from five university libraries between 2006-2007. It finds that only about 30% of print books purchased by the libraries are available across the four aggregator collections. The availability varies by publisher, subject area, and between libraries. The document concludes that e-book collections can currently only supplement, not replace, print book collections due to the lack of availability and usability limitations of e-book platforms.
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Print book availability from Ebook aggregators
- 1. To Supersede or Supplement? Profiling E-book Aggregator Collections vs. Our Print Collections Jason Price & John McDonald Libraries, Claremont University Consortium Charleston Conference, November 6, 2008
- 2. Motivation Consortium CEO requested a budget for the library to take a ‘paperless’ approach for future acquisitions -eJournals -eReference -eBooks (was to be supported by heavy ILL borrowing, though we don’t address that here)
- 3. Strategy Ignore usability & discipline preferences (at least initially) Assess availability and cost of replicating current purchasing patterns in e-format Today’s talk will focus on availability of ebooks that match libraries’ recent print book purchases
- 4. Other (more important?) factors… … that should affect choice of aggregator(s) Simultaneous use restrictions Interface Pricing model Price point Digital rights management
- 5. e.g. DRM continuum Add’l Reader software Adobe Reader only Adobe Reader Only
- 6. Outline Aggregator eBook availability profiles Library purchased print book profiles Matching library print book purchases vs. current eBook availability
- 7. Cleaning up the aggregator data Received full catalog data from all 4 aggregators Deleted all records without pISBN13s Removed less than 8% from any one aggregator Many more records had pISBNs than eISBNs added pISBN10s based on pISBN13s To allow comparison to print books in collections (thanks to Ebrary for the batch converter) Most records included Pub Year, Publisher, and Call number
- 8. How many ebooks are available?
- 9. What is the age profile of aggregated ebooks?
- 10. Aggregator Collection Age (2000s)
- 11. How much overlap is there between aggregator collections? 10/2008 Total number of unique books across collections = 221,591 = Aggregated Ebook Marketplace
- 12. What proportion of the marketplace is available from each aggregator? Full Collection: 221,591 unique ebooks MyI (minus ICON) EBRsubs EBL EBR NetL 2005 – 2007 Publication Years: 51,969 unique e-books
- 13. Library Purchase Profile Datasets SCELC libraries & U. Denver were asked to export records for all print monographs purchased between 1/1/2006 & 12/31/2007 They were given a specific step by step procedure that excluded Ebooks, and output: Title (245) Pub Year (260|c) Publisher (260|b) LC Call # (050) ISBN 020 (all repeated values) 4 libraries sent data + Claremont
- 14. ‘06-07 Library Purchases: # of print books
- 15. Library pBook Purchases: by Publication year
- 16. Library pBook Purchases by Discipline
- 17. Library pBook Purchases: Overlap
- 20. pBook purchases available as eBooks by Vendor 5% 13% 26% 23% 13% 10%
- 21. Electronic availability of purchased books
- 24. Claremont Purchased print books not avail. electronically
- 25. Summary of results Aggregator title lists are largely unique (>50% available from only 1 aggregator) Only 3 in 10 print titles purchased by any individual library during 2006-2007 are available in the ‘eBook Aggregator marketplace’ Initial observations: many print university press titles Claremont purchased are not available from eBook aggregators ebook availability varies across subjects
- 26. Main point: Supersede or Supplement? Can’d supersede: 70% of our print book purchases aren’t available as ebooks There are many ways to supplement: Subscription Model Publisher subject collections Demand-driven purchasing
- 27. Questions? Jason & John November 6, 2008
- 28. Discussion points What are some potential explanations for the low match rates? Are collections librarians ready to shift funds from print book purchases to ebook purchases? How do these data affect your ebook purchasing strategy?
- 29. (Jason’s) Opinions Purchasing & Hosting on 4 different aggregators is not an attractive solution for users OR libraries It is unfortunate that the richest aggregator collection is also the least usable (NetLibrary, please liberalise your DRM agreements)! Subscribed collections serve to supplement most affordably and could drive print use The best place to supersede right now is probably transformation of subject-by-publisher wide print standing orders to no-DRM direct publisher collections --especially in the disciplines where multi-author books are the norm
Editor's Notes
- Overall, our strategy was to set aside usability and discipline-related ebook issues, which have been covered in other presentations over the years, and instead to analyze the collections available to assess how they matched our own collecting patterns in print.
- But we wouldn’t feel right about focusing on availability without at least mentioning the bigger picture.
- With ebooks, Digital Rights/Usability issues are at least as important as collection breadth and depthThe only aggregator our library currently uses is NetLibrary, which has made ebooks unpopular with a number of our students because of simultaneous use and page-at-a-time only issuesThe massive continuum of use rights represented here should be a MAJOR factor in each libraries ebook aggregator decisions
- Jason will present data addressing collection profiles of each of the 4 major aggregatorsJohn will address print book purchasing profiles from 5 libraries and availability of their print purchases as electronic books
- Aggregator Collection data was updated Oct. 2008‘Unique identifiers’ for books more numerous than for journals, isbn’s much harder to work withDeletion justified because focused on titles that that would match print collections
- Requested data from all 4 major aggregatorsIncluded Ebrary Subscribable collection (i.e. Academic complete) as a separate collection, but NB: the Ebrary collection includes all books available for purchase from Ebrary (including some that are included in academic complete)Data received from NetLibrary didn’t include call number
- Ebrary has a deeper collection in terms of age with four times as many 80’s-90’s books as any other aggregatorVery few from 1970s or beforeMyIlibrary has twice as many books as any other aggregator with ‘pub year’ 2006 (turns out 23,615 were from ICON Group and were republished books or economic reports) – These books were removed from the rest of the analysis since their dates were not available and likely put them out of the range of current collection growth(Click) Next slide focuses on the ’00’s’
- (Blue) Net Library consistently has more books per year, even in the most recent decade(Orange) Ebrary Subscribed collection lacks books from 2007 & 2008(overall) Pattern of number of books available per year extremely consistent across aggregators(overall) Are there signs that the market place hit a growth peak in 2005?
- There are about 225,000 unique ebooks currently available from this set of aggregatorsThis data can be understood from the book’s perspective: if I’m a particular ebook, what are my chances of being available from one or more aggregators?In the overall marketplace, more than half of ebooks are unique to a single aggregator (56%), and only 1 in 25 is available from all 440% of the books are unique to NetLibrary, 7-10x as many as any other aggregatorNow we can look at availability from the libraries’ perspective [ Proportion of books available by aggregator ]*note: pie chart excludes Ebrary Subscription (3958 unique titles) and MyILibrary ICON published titles, q.v.)
- Read question: Ebook aggregator Marketplace = Available from at least one of the big fourGreen pies show about 1/5 of marketplace available from MyI, 1/3 fromEbrary & EBL, and ¾ from NetLLooking just at books published 2005 to 2007, EBL and MyI have about 3 in 10, Ebrary 4 in 10, and NetL 8 out of 10.
- We asked four other libraries to send us data extracted from the ILS for all purchases from 2006 to 2007. We cleaned the data and standardized it to the greatest extent possible.
- The most important part of the analysis is to compare the library print purchase patterns to the ebook vendor supplied lists.
- Overall, we found that aggregator title lists are still largely uniqueLibrary print purchase patterns are still largely unique as wellOnly 30% of print titles are available in the aggregated book marketplaceSome publisher-type differences may account for the non-match rates, as evidenced by our large % of non-matches in our university press purchases
- “Quiet challenge” to NetLibrary to expand their use rights to make their extensive collections usableConclusions– No possibility of duplicating our current print monograph print profiles in the ebook world
- What about the Google Books Settlement announcement?