From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 09:22:41 -0700

To Rick's question whether having e-books at *all* is a net gain:  I
think that it is, but a small one, and far smaller than it deserves to
be.  I'll be speaking Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST on a CRL webinar
(https://www.crl.edu/events/webinar-perpetual-access-myth-and-reality)
that addresses a small set of the issues I will discuss here.

ASU Library *needs* e-books.  We have tens of thousands of users who
will never set foot in our buildings, and my mantra is that all of our
students are on-line students.  The 10,000 who enter our biggest
building every day make very little use of the physical collections
and intensive use of what we offer on the net.  It's urgent that we
make this work.  It doesn't work very well.  I may feel that the more
strongly because I believe I was the first publisher of an online
scholarly monograph in the humanities in history, shepherding a book
of Bob Hollander's on Dante to internet screens in 1993.

What we get is near-ubiquitous (if on the network) accessibility.
That's probably 24-48 hours' improvement on the best we can do moving
printed books around.

What we also get includes:

1.  Dismal formats for reading.  This is true of all "e-books",
including emphatically Kindle and epub, which are functional mainly
for prose fiction and other consecutive narrative without references,
visual content, indices, footnotes, or the like.

2.  Restrictions on number of users.  Many (not all) e-book vendors to
libraries charge by and restrict number of simultaneous users.  True,
the print book has one user at a time.  But the e-article from a
journal publisher is easily accessed by as many readers as might be
interested at a given time.  This is a business, not technology
decision.  (When a faculty member decides to ask her students to read
an exciting new e-book, it may be either difficult or impossible for
them to do so, depending on the terms by which we get the book.)

3.  Restrictions on copying/printing/downloading.  If I have access to
a licensed, paid-for, entirely legitimate e-book on our library's
system and if I were to have at the same time access to a bootleg PDF
from a rogue website in Tadjikistan, I would prefer the PDF every
time.  This is the reverse of normal commercial practice, where the
knockoff Louis Vuitton bag is significantly lower in quality and
functionality than the $1000 original.

4.  Network and server latency.  It just takes longer to turn a page,
because the text is kept at all times on the host server, not
downloaded or even streamed.  This compounds the challenges of dismal
formats (pursuing a footnote is clumsy *and* slow, two different
problems).

5.  Platform idiosyncrasies.  We have e-books from at least three main
vendors, each of which allows access by going to their site, each of
which has its own layout, format, preferred proprietary method of
note-taking.  One helpfully allows 14 day "loan" by allowing download
of the full text -- *but* requires the user to create a new account
(separate from the university account that authenticates the user to
access at all) and then requires that the user acquire specific apps
on their own device to use for reading:  Adobe Digital Editions for
some devices, Bluefire Reader for others.  (My iPad now holds five
different apps for reading "e-books", each of which embraces a
different collection of books, arranged not by subject or genre but by
format and vendor restrictions on purchase/download/etc.  It's as
though I have a small library divided among five different rooms, with
no visible rhyme or reason to which books I am forced to keep in which
place.)  -- That fourteen day download/loan makes the e-book
inaccessible to others for the full fourteen day period, even if the
borrower is through with it in 24 hours.

6.  Pseudo-perpetual access:  The assurances of perpetual access we
get when we "buy" e-books this way are shaky and untested to say the
least.  The standard things you would do to ensure perpetual access
(open formats, trusted third parties, distributed copies) are either
not done or not securely known to be done.

The point of my original posting was to observe the multiplicity of
formats into which we are driven by the idiosyncrasies of the market,
and that remains an issue as well.  The "book" that we buy is not the
thing the publisher creates, but rather a complicated derivative of
the publisher's product, for the most part crippled in use in ways
that justifiably leave many scholars and readers complaining that
e-books are no darned good.  I wonder whether all publishers have
looked closely at the way their books are being presented to library
users.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU