[Eril-l] Academic library ebook downloading is clumsy and ereader features inadequte - what are we doing about it?

[Heather Shipman]

We also prefer to buy e-books from the platforms that offer DRM-free PDF chapter downloads - those platforms are generally also entirely unlimited-user access, which is increasingly important to us as we're buying e-books to support course use. But you can't always buy the e-book you need on that kind of platform. So we've spoken with our aggregator reps about this, as well.

Ebrary, at least, has implemented DRM-free PDF chapter download functionality, but last I checked (quite some time ago), it was still suboptimal - if the chapter is longer than the publisher's "page download limit", the chapter download doesn't work. If it's a multivolume work, the platform sometimes considers a whole volume to be a "chapter", which is of course far beyond the page limit, so that also doesn't work. We pointed these things out to our reps during a visit, maybe last year or so? Two years ago? They took notes.

But ProQuest Ebook Central was probably in the works by then, so I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't bother integrating these fixes into Ebrary. We haven't been migrated to PQEC yet - does anybody who has know whether the chapter downloads work better there?

Our new ProQuest rep actually brought up the DRM issue on his own, when he visited recently. He, at least, thought it was something they should try to get rid of if they could talk publishers into it. No idea how much of that came from personal opinion vs. ProQuest internals, though.

I feel like quite often, when I bring up issues of page limits or DRM, aggregator reps will get all apologetic and explain that they have a zillion publishers to negotiate with, and not all publishers are on board; sometimes they have to update their platforms to enable certain features/restrictions to get certain publishers to participate at all. I think they don't have to enable all the restrictions on all the books, but it makes it impossible to do something sweepingly awesome like turning off all the DRM everywhere. So, it strikes me that the aggregators know it's a problem, but fixing it is hard. I would like to believe that they're working on this, one publisher contract at a time. I hope they are.

Does anybody have any success stories, talking any of the zillions of publishers into loosening restrictions? Do we know anything about what might persuade them?

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Heather Shipman
E-resources Acquisition Specialist
110 Olin Library, Cornell University
Heather.shipman at cornell.edu<mailto:Heather.shipman at cornell.edu> ; 607-254-1499

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Amy Lynn Fry
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2016 2:25 PM
To: Harper, Cynthia; Eril-l at lists.eril-l.org
Subject: Re: [Eril-l] Academic library ebook downloading is clumsy and ereader features inadequte - what are we doing about it?

I pointed this out to a ProQuest rep who was trying to encourage us to buy ebooks, and didn't get much of a reaction. I get the sense that ebook aggregators have been battling rather unsuccessfully with publishers so hard and for so long they maybe don't understand that we can't see their more streamlined process for downloading as a victory, the way they might. They probably think "it's so much better than it used to be!" And that's true. But it's woefully inadequate if the goal is to get people to use academic ebooks through academic libraries.

I looked at our stats for full ebook downloads from ebrary and they're super tiny - no surprise there. Most people just don't bother to do that. I wouldn't.

I really don't understand why we keep wanting to buy ebooks when they're like this. I think the vendors are doing all they can and publishers are blocking as much as they can. And libraries keep buying, even though ebooks don't get used that much (look at how many of your ebook titles get used in a year - I bet it's about 10%) and they're hard to use and users don't prefer them.

I like the publishers like Oxford, Springer and Wiley where you can download whole chapters as pdfs (and for springer the whole book). It makes more sense to buy from these publishers and buy titles that are used that way (chapter by chapter). Everyone knows how to use pdfs, no extra logins are required, they're easy to read on your phone. I think people will actually do that. I do not think people will log in three times to three different systems and use an app they use for no other purpose.

Now if only we could get the openurl linking to work right for that...Sometimes it does.

Amy Fry
Associate Professor, E-resources Librarian
Jerome Library
Bowling Green, OH 43403
afry at bgsu.edu<mailto:afry at bgsu.edu>
email is the best way to reach me

From: Eril-l [mailto:eril-l-bounces at lists.eril-l.org] On Behalf Of Harper, Cynthia
Sent: Friday, June 17, 2016 2:06 PM
To: eril-l at lists.eril-l.org<mailto:eril-l at lists.eril-l.org>
Subject: [Eril-l] Academic library ebook downloading is clumsy and ereader features inadequte - what are we doing about it?

Hi all - I wonder if the message is getting through to aggregator vendors like EBSCo and Proquest that the download and DRM procedures for downloaded ebooks from their collections are seen as onerous by our patrons.  I just redesigned our ebook libguide http://vts.libguides.com/ebooks, and presented the process to the rest of the library staff.  They were underwhelmed, especially when my Avira Antivirus shut off my access to the license server (again) on the computer on which I was presenting.  And requiring three logins - one for remote access, one for the aggregator site, and one Adobe ID - seems preposterous to those getting a one-shot presentation.

I also notice that once I've downloaded to Adobe Digital Editions, the features provided differs from ebook to ebooks, based on whether it was a PDf or an epub.  Some PDFs don't even support searching.  Why can't you save the quotes you've highlighted in the ebook to a file?  I wonder if because Adobe Digital Editions is free software, does it suffer from a lack of vendor commitment?  Or do publishers prevent you from saving your highlighted quotes for copyright reasons?

Are vendors engaging with their customers in discussing these issues?  Where is the listserv conversation going on?

Cindy Harper
E-services and periodicals librarian
Virginia Theological Seminary
Bishop Payne Library
3737 Seminary Road
Alexandria VA 22304
charper at vts.edu<mailto:charper at vts.edu>
703-461-1794

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