My colleague Ben Showers has recently been looking across the work taking place around digital books in all their forms: open textbooks, digital monographs, epub, web-based books. For educational institutions the need to keep up with the content needs of learners and researchers is paramount but so much is happening at the moment, with hardware, content formats, the emergence of new authoring tools and rising user expectations, so where do you start?
We have pulled together some key information for decision-makers, with a distinct JISC flavour. Particular thanks to Caren Milloy from JISC Collections and Zak Mensah from JISC Digital Media for their help.
Legal (Licensing, IPR, DRM)
- E-books for Skills: Licensing model for e-textbooks for use by ACL, WBL and Offender Learning
- PublishOER is looking at licensing issues and models for incorporating publisher content into OER, building on CASPER
- Legal Aspects of OERs: OER Infokit (more IPR specific support is on OER IPR website but nothing specific on etextbooks yet)
- OER Report on Open Practice across sectors (implications for textbooks)
- Jorum is now hosting resources from the Saylor Foundation who have been supporting open textbooks
Business Models
- Frances Pinter (Bloomsbury Academic) – Frances Pinter future of academic monograph slides and : video
- e- textbooks on mobile devices: JISC Collections is working with the University of Lincoln to licence ebooks for use on mobile devices but downloadable via the VLE.
- Pilot of a consortia model for e-books: JISC Collections is working with Swets to pilot the model used by the Max Plank Society
- E-books for Skills: JISC Collections is looking at the business model to support licensing ebooks to ACL, WBL and Offender Learning
- PublishOER is looking at the sorts of negotiations needed between OER producers and publishers and how the business models might work
- The future of the scholarly monograph in humanities and social sciences: OAPEN-UK
- Living Books for Life: A sustainable, low cost model for publishing books
- Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits: Houghton Report (not directly linked but the models around research articles could lend themselves to a similar move in the area of books/learning resources)
- e-Textbook business models (JISC Collections)
- E-books for FE eTextbooks Business Models report looked at the barriers to the adoption of textbooks in FE
- JISC eBooks for FE explored standard subscription / purchase model and more recently, the Patron-Driven Aquisition model at a national level
- Wikieducator Open Textbook book explores the use and adoption of open textbooks for teaching
Technology and Standards
- Textus project
- HTML5 case studies (to be available shortly)
- JISC Digital Media have a report on html 5 / video
- jiscPUB: Digital Monograph Technical Landscape: Exemplars and Recommendations
- Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review at Edina
- JISC Scholarly Comms: Campus Based Publishing
- TechDis: Access to eBooks
- JISC Digital Media Introduction to eBooks
- JISC Pals, TIME ebook metadata work 2006
- ebooks metadata RDTF (Discovery ) vision – see the attachments
- Discovery initiative on open metadata, focused on bibliographic metadata and open metadata – discovery
- KB + will help support institutions in the management and discovery of ebooks
User behaviour/Requirements
- JISC Collections (Carol Tenopir) study on scholarly reading: UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources: Summary Results of the Study Conducted Spring 2011
- PALS group study on Patron Driven Acquisition of eBooks and the role metadata plays in that process: Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA) and the role of metadata in the discovery, selection and acquisition of ebooks
- JISC eBooks Observatory project: http://observatory.jiscebooks.org/
- Open etextbook Use Case from JISC CETIS
What have we missed?
Please let us know what resources you find most useful, from JISC and elsewhere, in meeting the challenge of ebooks in your institution.
Ben Showers and Amber Thomas, JISC Digital Infrastructure Team
May 2012
(last updated 28th May 2012)