Ebooks

Springer (yes, the STM book/journal publisher) has just released the findings of a new study on ebooks. The white paper, which is a follow up to the Springer 2007 survey on ebook adoption rates and benefits, outlines the end-user perspective on ebooks (e.g., how familiar they are with ebooks, as well as the frequency with which they access these resources). While the 2007 survey included six institutions, only five institutions participated in the 2008 round. It appears that the University of Florida and Victoria University (Australia) were involved in 2007 but not 2008. A new addition in 2008 was JRD Tata Memorial Library Bangalore, India.

The results from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were highlighted by the authors. At this institution, research and study were the top reasons students use ebooks. Leisure was trailing behind 68 percentage points. Reference works were also mentioned by respondents at the other institutions. Conference proceedings and textbooks received high marks as well.

While the respondents were familiar and used ebooks, they also pointed out advantages and disadvantages with these types of resources. The primary advantage of ebooks was full text searching. Convenience and easy assess were two others. However, reading from a screen prevented some from not using ebooks more frequently. Users are comfortable with print books and have a long history with that format. In the future, the respondents believe that they will access ebooks for certain types of reading such as looking up research/references materials but will continue to prefer print books for other types of reading.

In the end, the authors of this white paper conclude that "While eBooks will not replace print books in the near future, users are rapidly adopting them as complementary to print books" (p. 8).