From: "Hamaker, Charles" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 20:26:31 +0000 Any meaningful discussion of ebook collections, in the context of an academic research library’s selection and publisher pricing strategies, must take care not to leap to casual and dangerously overreaching assumptions and/or conclusions. Library purchasing decisions and publisher content and pricing determinations are undoubtedly each driven by a complicated set of internal and external factors that cannot be reduced to a simple cause-effect relationship, at least at the national level. This is especially true where so many variables abound. How much of a library’s budget for what kinds of items is governed by what percentage or type of patron requests? What are the terms of use for the ebooks? Do DRM'd titles with limits on pages viewed, printed, downloaded, artificially inflate section use in COUNTER stats? What assumptions are being made about the value (if any) of ebook usage by different groups? What are the demographics of the group(s) using the content? Is there any objective evaluation of the use? The literature that I am aware of (JISC) indicates that ebook use is primarily driven by undergraduate demand. Additionally, although the actual number of books involved is quite small, my review of our eBook usage (e.g., Project Muse, fall 2013) showed it to be demonstrably driven by undergraduate course adoption titles plus supplementary readings. What does that mean? If this is true of other institutions will publishers have to cater to more undergraduate needs to sell books? I would suggest that researcher use is not as direct as undergrad use. And in discovery with the exception of a few good publisher designed websites, we do a lousy job at uncovering what is in the research focused ebook. The MARC record is a an inadequate signpost of what is actually in a book. And so far Discovery services, with the exception of large full text collection indexing do not support individual ebook title by title fulltext indexing unless the title is in one of many in a larger collection My comments in no way question the decision or the letter of BLC. I simply underline the critical role a more complete and thorough knowledge of how/if and to what extent (to name a few factors) ebook usage patterns look like nationally before I would postulate a cause-effect relationship in supply/demand pricing beyond the experience of BLC. With thanks to internal staff for helping me make sense of my midnight thinking... Chuck Hamaker