From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2016 17:44:16 +0000

Hi, Jim –

I’m interested in your phrase “what publishers and libraries persist
in calling ‘ebooks.’” I get the impression that you’re suggesting
“ebooks” is the wrong term for the things to which you’re referring.
Am I mistaken – and if not, can you expand on that?

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
[log in to unmask]


On 12/11/16, 2:37 PM, "LibLicense-L Discussion Forum on behalf of LIBLICENSE"
<[log in to unmask]
on behalf of [log in to unmask]> wrote:

    From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
    Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2016 14:02:15 -0700

    Jill O'Neill of NISO has an interesting place from which to observe
    the various insanities and inanities of the market in what publishers
    and libraries persist in calling "ebooks" and she has an excellent
    posting on the Scholarly Kitchen on the theme:

    https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/12/05/monographs-transparency-and-open-access/

    Observe that it's not just that "discovery tools" fail in this case
    (without a lot of hunter-gatherer work on the user's part), but they
    fail because traditional metadata don't capture quite enough:  we
    don't want merely title, author, keywords/subjects, and similar
    information, but we also want to know things about conditions of
    access.  If we're lucky, it's as simple as OA/Paywall, but in this
    case it's something that happens to be OA on a site that has a range
    of kinds of materials, and the first discovery tool in fact
    misinformed her about the conditions she would find there -- and it
    was only stubborn persistence that got to the final revelation.  So
    this is a case where the issues are one part technology of ebook and
    two parts legal/contractual questions of access to resources.  What
    will make progress happen?

    Jim O'Donnell
    ASU