What do faculty and students really think about e‐books?

Abstract

This article reports on a large-scale survey of nearly two thousand faculty and students at one institution, University College London, and profiles their use and perceptions of ebooks. The context for the study is an action research project, CIBER's SuperBook, that will further investigate the issues raised in this initial benchmarking survey using deep log analysis and qualitative methods. The survey findings point to various ways in which user uptake and acceptance of e-books may be encouraged. Book discovery behaviour, a key issue for publishers and librarians in both print and electronic environments, emerges as a critical focus for service delivery and enhancement. Context for the researchUntil very recently, research into how digital resources are used within the academy has focused primarily on journals. Considerable steps have been made by CIBER in understanding journal user behaviour, through groundbreaking studies of Emerald, Blackwell Synergy, OhioLINK, and Oxford Open journal platforms. These studies led on the analysis of the digital "fingerprints" left by the users of electronic journals. However, the virtual scholar uses a much wider range of digitally delivered content to achieve their research, teaching and learning goals. As a first step towards a more rounded picture of how digital resources are used, we are now subjecting e-books, the new kid on the block, to the same robust approach that we have previously reserved for journals.There is much talk about the market potential for e-books, especially in a higher education context, but few robust user studies. This is worrying because e-books have, arguably, greater potential to change the information landscape than journals. We are addressing this issue through SuperBook, an action research study, funded by Wiley, Emerald and CIBER, which involves 'dropping' about three thousand carefully selected e-texts into the UCL community and then

The Case for e-Book Literacy: Undergraduate Students' Experience with e-Books for Course Work

“…Rowlands et al (2007) argued that "more work on actual, rather than self-reported, reading behaviour is urgently needed." The user experience can only be captured by direct observation of users of e-books for their scholarly activity.…”

An Exploration of ebook Selection Behavior in Academic Library Collections

“…Rowlands et al noted in 2007 [21] that book selection was a surprisingly unstudied part of the book use process, an assessment that remains true today. Studies of children's book selection practices are more common than those of adults: Reutzel and Gali [20] followed a number of children through the process of checking out library books, and noted that children were more likely to choose books from eye-level, tended to make judgments based on color, and that while they occasionally flipped through books, they rarely made decisions on the basis of content.…”

Tyranny of Distance: Understanding Academic Library Browsing by Refining the Neighbour Effect

“…Rowlands' 2007 critique of the limited research on book selection [2] has been followed by a steady growth in that literature. The process of choosing a book in a library can be divided into 5 components: identifying a need for a book; searching (this step may be skipped); locating books of interest; choosing among them; and reading or otherwise using selected books.…”

“…Participants in a 2007 study comparing physical and digital libraries noted there is no digital analogue of library shelves for book seeking, particularly in terms of serendipitous discovery [1]; that same year Rowlands noted the dearth of literature on book selection [2]. Despite later research on book selection, reader behaviour at the library shelves remains largely mysterious.…”