Caren Milloy describes how Jisc set up its National E-Books Observatory Project, persuading publishers to license their products for a whole year – in return for robust, valuable data on the market for this new resource.
For many years academic librarians have tried in vain to acquire core reading list materials in electronic format. The Jisc National E-Books Observatory Project is about to make the vital breakthrough by providing – free at the point of use – a range of high-demand books for taught course students in all UK universities for a period of two years.
The project will allow both librarians and participating publishers and aggregators to assess data about the use of such materials. But, more than that, it is about meeting the requirements for flexible licensing and pricing models that can provide students with access to their taught course texts online. It is about how e-books (in this case texts that support taught course students rather than reference e-books) can be used better, how they might fulfil their potential as a vital educational resource.
Getting the funding
But did Jisc Collections – the organisation that licenses online resources on behalf of UK further and higher education – have to get involved at all, with publishers, e-book aggregators, booksellers, Amazon, Google and the like in the mix?
The answer we got from the 2006 Feasibility Study on the Acquisition of E-books in Higher Education and the Role of Jisc was a resounding ‘Yes’. It found that institutions were either ‘very eager’ or ‘fairly eager’ to develop e-book collections and that the main barrier was not a lack of demand but rather the dearth of e-books being made available.1 Unfortunately many publishers and aggregators saw this the other way around: they thought there wasn’t enough demand to make these e-books available online and risk the potential loss of sales income from students – understandable when so little revenue for e-books comes from libraries.
The 2007 Publishers Association Annual Survey of Spending in University Libraries shows that the total e-book market in the UK is estimated at about £180m-£200m per year. Although around £182.6m of that figure comes from universities, ‘72.6% was spending by students and 27.4% spending by libraries’.2 The 2006 feasibility study clearly identified that HE libraries wanted Jisc Collections to take the lead and to encourage publishers and aggregators to make available e-books to meet their taught course students’ needs. With such evidence, funding of £600,000 was granted for the e-books project as part of Jisc’s 2006-09 capital programme of £84m.
Getting the bids in
Jisc Collections was delighted to get the funding but there was another hurdle to get over. Even though we were offering to pay the publishers and aggregators a fee for the e-books that were selected and licensed, to help mitigate the risk of revenue loss, we still had to persuade them that this was an opportunity for them to gather in-depth data on their e-books and their users, data which they needed to have.
A briefing event was attended by more than 20 publishers and aggregators. Questions posed during the day were principally about money. Would Jisc Collections, for example, fund the digitisation of texts? No, was the answer. Would Jisc be involved in the business arrangements between the publishers and the aggregator? Again, No. Would Jisc purchase the titles at the end of the project (No) and who would manage the relationships with the bookshops (not Jisc)?
At the end of the event I felt that the message had been communicated that the project would involve collaboration and some risks, but that there were significant advantages in taking part. At the UK Serials Group Conference in April, contact was made again and once more I rallied the publishers and aggregators. The one thing that really struck me from conversations was that publishers had no single e-books department responsible for putting the bid together.
Several departments had to be consulted, such as textbooks, sales, those in charge of platforms, finance, rights and so on. Back in 2005, the Jisc e-books working group had held a number of meetings with publishers, who had said that they did not yet have an e-books strategy as they were unsure of the market. Two years later and I sensed that, although progress had been made, they were still dipping their toes in the water and waiting for someone else to take the initiative.
We received 11 tenders, which was encouraging. However, after reading some of them I felt frustrated that they were not entering into the spirit of the project and making the most of this opportunity. I felt that their reluctance was in fact simply delaying an inevitable change, given that print sales have been shown to be declining year upon year. But some of bids met the requirements and embraced the chance to experiment in a safe environment.
Getting the right e-books
The next challenge was selecting e-books from the bids that would meet the needs of taught course students in medicine, media studies, business and management studies and engineering. The project board was consulted, as was the Jisc Library and Advisory Working Group, to find the most effective way of ranking a potential 3,000 e-books. This was not easy: where one institution has reading lists, another has recommended texts; where one institution receives the next year’s reading list by June, another doesn’t receive anything; and where one institution has a specific subject librarian in charge, another has no specialist.
The consultation therefore had to cater for a variety of ways of identifying and ranking the e-books. Six bids made it through to the consultation, equating to a total of 136 e-books – seven in media studies, 29 in engineering, 42 in medicine, 58 in business and management.
Here was another major challenge. The value placed by the publishers on these 136 e-books, with free-at-the-point-of-use access, for all UK HE institutions (more than 2.4m students and their tutors) was £2.08m excluding VAT! The consultation process enabled Jisc Collections to prioritise within the £600,000 funding available.
We received more than 70 institutional responses to the consultation. Such a good response shows the interest in this area is very high and that there is a strong desire for the e-books market to progress.
E-Books available
The project board explored several scenarios before finalising the 36 e-books that will be licensed as part of the project (seven in media studies, 10 in medicine, 14 in engineering and five in business and management). The medical titles will be available on the books@ovid platform and all the other titles will be on the MyiLibrary platform. Marc records will be provided free of charge for all the e-books licensed.
Meeting expectations
This project has to meet the expectations of many – librarians, students, publishers, aggregators, Jisc committee members and Jisc’s funders. When initiating the project, our principal funder, HEFCE, asked me why a list of core texts from libraries wasn’t gathered and licensed.
Apart from the sheer scale of this and the fact that what is core in one institution is not core in another, I knew that such a task would be pointless. Publishers were not simply going to hand over their most valuable textbooks and hope for the best. Discussions with aggregators who had been trying this route on behalf of universities revealed that their efforts were painfully protracted and not yielding results.
The decision to carry out a tender process was realistic. Bidders had to submit texts that were post-2000, the latest edition, say if the text was recommended, essential or supplementary reading and provide sales numbers to back their assessment up. The consultation exercise was the process by which this information was verified.
During the consultation, however, some librarians expressed disappointment about the low number of texts on offer and the lack of major textbooks. But we knew that publishers and aggregators wouldn’t submit their best-sellers. They did put forward popular, strong-selling texts, as reflected by the high prices they were charging. For example, the average price for each of the e-books included in the business and management collection was £60k, and the project board even had to agree to strip out some titles that were more than £100k as they would eat up too much of the budget.
In addition, the consultation feedback told us that some bids should not proceed further as they did not meet required technical standards and terms of use. We were realistic about the situation and did not raise expectations which we couldn’t meet.
If the project is successful and the deep log analysis of the 36 e-books we are licensing provides us with the in-depth data required to create business and licensing models that meet the needs and expectations of all, then the publishers will make available their core textbooks. The potential is in the future.
The deep log analysis study, part of the Jisc national e-books observatory, will monitor for a full year the usage of the e-books and analyse the ‘digital fingerprints’ of users. For this we need students to use the e-books and this requires promotion. The routes through which users discover an e-book are varied and as yet there is no consensus. But one thing is clear: with e-books, the librarian is somewhere near the centre of the chain. Librarians therefore need to become involved, and engaging librarians is central to Jisc Collections’ promotion of this initiative which we hope will have a major impact on the use of e-books.
Jisc Collections will be providing promotional tools to librarians and offering workshops. But we need librarians to help us reach students and teaching staff. If you have an idea about a new promotional method or how a new Web 2.0 technology can be used to reach the ‘digital natives’, do tell us so that we can monitor the effects on the usage and your print circulation figures through the deep log analysis and report back to you. If it works then we can share the method with all universities.
At the end of the project, we will be able to say which promotional techniques work best for different types of users. Until then, let’s experiment, observe and share ideas.
References
1 The Higher Education Consultancy Group 2006, p.15.
2 The University Library Spending Report 2007, p. 20.
Caren Milloy is E-books Project Manager, Jisc Collections.
For further information on the Jisc National E-books Observatory Project, visit www.jiscebooksproject.org.uk or contact Caren (c.milloy@jisc.ac.uk).
Updated: 24 October 2007