From: "Matheson, Scott" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2016 14:22:20 +0000

Hi Jim -

To your 2-5 (and maybe 6), our library (the law library only) has the
luxury (?) of not needing to view all our students as online students
as you correctly must. This has afforded us the opportunity to simply
say "no, thank you" to offers of online ersatz books; we frequently
continue to purchase the print instead. I have seen in the market that
more platforms and publishers have begun to offer what we believe best
serves our patrons - that is books that are downloadable as PDF,
viewable on many screen sizes, unencumbered by simultaneous user
limits or printing restrictions. I am optimistic that this trend will
continue (though am cognizant that there are countervailing pricing
pressures).

My corollary to your "all students are online students" is "all books
are potentially reserve books." Arbitrary, opaque use restrictions or
lack of permanence that mean I wouldn't put it on reserve for a class,
mean I'll argue hard against "buying" it.

To address the issue of classic works (especially multivolume), these
seem to me ideal candidates for projects that buy out rights and
render them open access in a post hoc fashion. Once they are
identified as "classics" it would reduce transaction costs and
increase access for all involved if there were a collective buyout
mechanism - like the one at unglue.it or being investigated by Mellon
or even by an organization like CRL or Hathi.

I share your frustration with the fragmentation of platforms - which
we see in our professional lives and when trying to figure out if that
thing we want to watch is on Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or Vudu or only
in the PBS app or.... The only solution I've come up with is not
creative, new, high-tech, or cheap: a good catalog that organizes the
collection in an intellectually rational way and points to the content
wherever it lives.

Scott

____________
Scott Matheson, Associate Librarian for Technical Services
Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School
203-432-1603 | Box 208326, New Haven, CT 06520-8326

> On Jan 19, 2016, at 8:42 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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