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e-Books and e-Journals: the futureE-books are still in their infancy compared with e-jounals. Only a tiny percentage of published titles are available in this form, and the percentage is growing only very slowly. Publishers are beginning to accept the concept, but with many caveats and conditions. Some will only make older material available - to protect current hard-copy sales. None will make available to libraries textbooks with high-volume sales - to protect current revenue derived from individual students. This may change with the development of a mass market. There are rumours that Apple is developing a new i-pod that will function as an e-book reader, and has acquired rights to the content of one major publisher (see Apple to do eBooks? - Engadget) If this does at last kick-start a mass market, academic texts will be carried along. Also some publishers (Springer for example) are moving away from the traditional division of content into journals, reference works and monographs; they see them all as content. This is also the attitude of Ebrary (one of the main aggregators), who see themselves not as an e-book vendor but as a purveyor of and gateway to electronic content. Our students certainly do not differentiate by forms such as monographs; they embrace the electronic medium. We have seen downloads from e-journals treble in three years, from 200k to 600k. At the same time the last two years have seen loans of hard-copy books decline by 20%. The lesson is that undergraduates are using journals, which traditionally they would not have touched, simply because they are electronic, and easily searchable and obtainable. There is however some evidence to show that clinicians prefer hard-copy to electronic journal articles . presumably because they are better able to read it on wards. This will apply equally to e-books, although, except for the reference works noted above, one hopes that clinicians do not need to refer to monographs as much as to journal articles. David Ball This article links to good resources on e-learning. Papers of 'E-Learning and the new Information Technologies in Medical Libraries' are on the Inforum site. 'A New model for procuring e-books for the virtual learning environment' David Ball, Bournemouth University. |
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