Standards stall students' use of e-books

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 02 November 2011 15:27

Business IT - Technology

Over the last three years the use of e-books as an alternative to print books has stalled with a new global survey of 6,500 students finding students still find the two equally important for their studies. According to Gartner research director Marti Harris part of the problem is a persistent lack of standards in terms of the e-book platform.

The 2011 Global student E-book Survey will be released on Friday at a conference in the US by ebrary, which supplies e-books and research technologies to libraries. The organisation conducted a similar survey in 2008 and has found that in the last three years e-book usage and awareness among students have not increased significantly.

According to Ms Harris the lack of standard platform for e-books was hampering their adoption, and in many cases electronic textbooks were only digitised versions of print books, rather than new products with additional functionality. 'If it's just a digitised book then a student many not find it more useful apart from the reduced weight,' she said, speaking to iTWire from the US.

The challenge for publishers was determining which platform to publish to. She said that it was unreasonable to expect students to purchase a single use device for e-books, but instead to have a device using perhaps iOS or Android that they used as the platform for e-books, communicating and entertainment purposes.

Having multiple device formats was a challenge for publishers she acknowledged.

Another part of the problem seems to be the way in which access to e-books is often provided as an online resource in libraries. A separate ebrary survey of 1,000 librarians found that 92 per cent found it was more or equally important to provide offline access to e-books as well as online access to resources - that is, as downloads.

In a media release issued by ebrary, Carol Zsulya, head of collection management in business and economics for Cleveland State University noted: 'The increasing popularity of consumer technologies such as social media, handheld devices, tablets, and e-readers is changing the information landscape and directly impacting students. They expect to have the information they need available the second they need it, regardless of format.'