JISC

The sales’ growth and the development of e-books have been hotly debated at this year’s London Book Fair, with the e-books for academia market acknowledged as being further developed than other areas.

Press coverage generated in this week’s Research Information and Publishers’ Weekly prove what a significant topic this is for the academic, publishing and scholarly communities.

A panel at the London Book Fair believe that a key myth has been shattered by early results from JISC Collections’ recently concluded e-books observatory project. (During this two-year project, JISC provided UK university students with free access to 36 core e-textbooks in science, technology and medicine to all UK university students, to monitor their usage patterns.)

e-book usage actually has ‘no impact’ on print sales.

The presumption that increased e-book usage will negatively affect sales is overturned by the report. Its findings reveal that, in reality, e-book usage actually has ‘no impact’ on print sales. A second myth that looks set to be shattered is that only younger students, the so-called ‘Google generation’, use the online resources. Usage was actually widespread across all age groups.

Caren Milloy manages the e-books observatory project on behalf of JISC Collections. Milloy said that the two-year effort is the largest e-book study ever conducted, with around 48,000 survey responses and using information gathered from 127 UK universities.

The study was faciliated by Ingram Digital Group's MyiLibrary unit, with e-textbooks and content provided by academic publishers including Pearson Education, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier Science, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge University Press and Thomas Telford.

The results from the e-books observatory project will be published in June.

JISC Collections
JISC and publishers to collaborate on e-books observatory article


Dispelling myths with real evidence podcast link
Exploring e-books podcast link