What is it about?
We look at six sample ebooks from a college library, examining their characteristics, with a deep dive into the meaning of usage statistics. We discuss the problems with how the usage statistics are defined and calculated by different ebook providers.
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Why is it important?
Librarians measure "cost per use" when evaluating electronic resources. That is, we look at the annual cost of the resource and divide that by the number of times it was used in the year. As we see, usage of ebooks is defined in different ways, and can not be compared across platforms. This has significant ramifications for library budgeting and planning.
Perspectives
I was surprised to learn the depths of the problem. There are standards in place (known as COUNTER) for usage statistics for library e-resources, but these leave too much room for interpretation by the vendors. Some of the statistics we receive don't even refer to those vendors' ebooks, but their databases instead.
Jonathan Hoyt Harwell
Rollins College
Readers may be surprised by our findings; we definitely were!
Erin Gallagher
Reed College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The secret lives of ebooks, Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, January 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1354856517751379.
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