Why Collect a Million E-books?

Mountain climbers, it is said, scale high peaks just because the mountains “are there.” Have we purchased more than a million e-books for the same reason just because the e-books are there and so, why not buy them? The simple answer to this question is no. We have acquired them for three basic reasons: the growing supremacy of the web, changes in how students are taught, and publishers are finally getting over their fears that e-books will erode their revenues.

The first reason for buying one million e-books relates to the dominance of the web today. E-books are accessed via the web and for most young students, if it isn't on the web, it doesn't exist! While this might seem to be a bit of an over exaggeration, in a recent examination of the information gathering habits of college students conducted by the Online Computer Library Council, two very interesting pieces of data were presented:

	Nearly 90 percent of all college students indicated that they began their information searches with an Internet search engine (e.g., Google).
	While 52 percent of these same college students viewed web, search engines “very” favourably, only 47 percent said the same about physical libraries.

The first percentage is probably not surprising. My guess is most people, irrespective of age, use Google or Yahoo when they want to better understand just about anything – it is so easy. What is surprising is the second percentage: while the modern university and their libraries have been around for about 125 years, it only took 15 years for the Internet to claim the hearts and minds of students and to nudge the library from its position as the most important source of information about things not well understood.

A second reason to herald the day of the e-book relates to the changes in how teaching is taking place. Teachers have always supplemented their lectures with textbooks and reading assignments from the library. But they are now using a new technique called blended learning that involves the use of online teaching techniques in addition to face to face teaching to supplement their efforts to insure that learning takes place. In blended learning students are asked to read materials and chat online or otherwise express what they have learnt. With the Internet, the materials read are simply provided directly to students online, without the need to buy a textbook or go to the library to check a book out or find an article in a journal. In addition to blended learning, many teachers these days are also using problem-based learning to enrich their teaching. Groups of students are given a problem, pointed to a body of information which they then discuss/research on or offline, and then they are required to present their results. In both cases, e-books, in addition to e-journal articles, can be enormously useful.

The third reason why we have bought so many e-books relates to changes in the publishing industry. Previously, not many libraries bought e-books because, except for large collections of out of print books, there have been relatively few good new books to purchase. E-books have posed contradictory challenges for academic publishers of new titles: Publishers have feared few people would read their e-books and at the same time they feared that readers/printing pirates would copy their e-books and send them around the world without paying the publishers anything. It now appears that publishers are starting to put these problems behind them.

No one denies that reading computer screens for long periods of time isn't tedious/painful -- although today's generation seems quite willing to spend hours reading emails, surfing the web, and doing text messaging using computers, mobile phones, etc. Because reading computer screens is not fun, there have been lots of doubts about the value of publishing e-books. But everyone who has used an e-book search engine to search for a key word(s) in an individual e-book, if not hundreds or thousands of e-books simultaneously, knows that being able to use a computer to read an e-book has great value, it saves time. E-books, it turns out are for people who want quick access to specific bits of information, while printed books are for those who want to spend more time reading a book front to back to get an overall understanding of the content, whether fiction or non-fiction. Both formats have value.

It also cannot be denied that the Internet makes it easy to share information, including books, legally and illegally. Yet, the Internet can also be used to help publishers sell their books. Indeed, while Google's digitisation of older books published after 1924 gives readers snippets of free information, these same readers are given the opportunity to buy the entire book if they want to read it all. This will help publishers even though they will have to share the profits with Google. This will be a radically different situation than in the past when fewer than 1,000 libraries world-wide would buy most scholarly books. Worries about the “death of the monograph” have been founded upon the reality that fewer and fewer academic books have been purchased and then by only a relatively few libraries. Increasingly, however, academic presses are finding that instead of print revenues being reduced, the Internet can enable them to sell more books that ever before. While publishers are currently fighting Google, it seems that they may be simply angling for a better position with which to negotiate a mutually favourable solution. Our own University Press recently sent 400 of its books off to be digitised and included in the Google effort.

How have we done it?

The simple answer is we have bought a lot of e-books; we have leased some; and we have created some others. The following pie chart illustrates the degree to which we used each approach:

The “we” in all of these actions refers to a host of library staff members including those in Collection Development, Systems, Acquisitions, but especially our E-Resources acquisitions coordinator, Janny Lai, and our Chinese bibliographer Angela Ko.

Some aspects of building an e-book collection are identical to buying printed books: You need to analyse the needs of users and look for what is out there that matches these needs; compare what you can find with the money in your budget; prioritise your selections; order the chosen materials, and receive and catalogue them upon receipt.
The fact that we have created so many e-books ourselves differs from print collection building. By “created” I mean the reformatting or digitising of existing materials to make e-books. We have involved ourselves in a range of projects but they have focused upon Hong Kong and China:

	Hong Kong Government Reports Online (1853-1941)
	China Through Western Eyes
	Digital Editions from HKU Press
	Hong Kong Theses Online
	China American Million Book Project

We have also very selectively collected free e-books from the web and catalogued them just as if we owned them by including links in our cataloguing records. When our readers click on the link they are connected to the books on computer servers located all over the world.

What do we have?

Subject wise, it is interesting to note that, like our printed book collections, the humanities and arts dominate, with the social sciences and sciences accounting for smaller portions of the collection:

Similarly, language wise, most of the books in our e-book collection are in Chinese but with a sizeable number in English:

Finally, again like the materials in our printed collection, imprint date wise our e-book collection is composed mainly of twentieth and twenty-first century materials:

What do our users think about e-books and how much have they been used?

E-books are not nearly as popular as e-journals. There are signs, however, that e-books are gradually becoming more popular. We annually do surveys of user attitudes and preferences. The 2005 survey indicated that preferences for printed books declined from 71.8% to 67.2% over the previous year. Of course this still means that nearly 2/3 of our users favour reading printed books, but the use of e-books appears to be on the rise. We don't really have good data yet but we can look at the number of accesses of the major collections via EZProxy for an indication of what is happening:

EZProxy Statistics

This data underestimates the amount of e-book usage since it only measures just a few of our e-book collections and the number of times the E-ZProxy door was opened to readers. The data doesn't say anything about how many e-books were read once the door was opened nor does it count the amount of use by readers who didn't need to be proxied before entering the system. Nevertheless, even incomplete data shows that e-book usage is growing. As with the introduction of many new services, having a critical mass of things to be used by the public is very important. With more than one million e-books, users at our University seem to be deciding that it is worth the new actions and behaviours that must be learnt to use them effectively.

How much did we spend?

Two factors have influenced the amount of funds we have spent over the course of the past five years: treating e-books as commodities and sharing their cost with others through consortia buying.

E-books collections are priced like commodities. That is, the per-unit price of each title depends upon the volume of materials purchased. The amount of variance can be considerable when committing to buy a thousand, ten thousand, or one hundred thousand e-books compared with the price of a single title. Most of the e-books we have bought have been acquired in this manner. We have, moreover, entered into multiple year arrangements with e-book providers in order to secure the lowest prices possible
for the materials we have acquired.

E-books are frequently bought in the context of consortia. For example, in the U.S., when I was at Columbia and working with librarians at Cornell, Dartmouth, and Middlebury (CCDM), we put together a consortia to buy e-books for the use of students and staff at all four institutions. This meant we could split the cost of each e-book four ways. When I came to the University of Hong Kong we negotiated with the CCDM consortia to allow us to access all the books they had bought. They used our funds to buy more e-books for all five of our institutions to share. Another example of consortia buying took place last year. Consortia of nearly 40 academic libraries in Taiwan with matching funds from their government invited our library and others in Hong Kong to join them in purchasing e-books. In both the CCDM and Taiwan consortia cases, splitting the costs with others, five ways in one case and 40+ (including the Hong Kong libraries) ways in another, results in cheaper costs than when going it alone.

In general, our per volume costs have varied, depending upon how many volumes we purchased/committed to purchase and whether or not we bought them via a consortia, from HK$8.00 to HK$100. When neither or both of these approaches was available, the cost of each e-book has been the same as, or more than, the price for a western printed academic book since some vendors charge up to 50% more than the printed book retail price to guarantee long term access, e.g., HK$514 to $772 per volume. The cost for individual Chinese e-books was much less. Since many of the purchase agreements we have entered into are confidential we cannot disclose the exact amount we have expended over the past five years assembling this collection. While it is a significant amount, we have generally relied upon gift and endowment funds to make this rate of growth possible.

What have we learned along the way?

While much of the collection building work has been similar to that done when creating printed collections, we have had to learn many new lessons:

	Most e-books are purchased in blocks of titles not one by one, e.g., Early English Books Online or customised subject collections of e-books put together by vendor based upon specific sets of topic and imprint date criteria supplied by us.
	When buying e-books you are much more cognisant of the ongoing storage and preservation costs than when buying printed books.
	E-books mounted on external servers can incur annual access and maintenance costs.
	Occasionally you have to rent e-books instead of buying them.
	Collecting e-books entails many new public service activities not associated with the purchase of printed books, e.g., we annually hold an e-book month to promote reader awareness; we teach classes on how to use the major e-book collections; and our readers have to deal with different platforms and printing restrictions. And readers have to adjust as well.
	E-books entail the use of equipment. At most printed books require glasses.
	Buying e-books is labour intensive: setting up trials, working with agents, negotiating licenses, purchasing, dealing with hardware and software issues, looking for cataloguing records to copy and or upgrade, creating new records, training new and old staff to deal with these formats, insuring that needed quality control measure are in place, etc.
	While it took more than 80 years to collect our first one million print volumes, we bought that many e-books over the course of five years. Yet, getting all the work associated with this accomplishment is like trying to drink out of the proverbial “fire hose.” We have catalogued 475,000 e-book titles (June 2006) so far, but we have more than a half million to go and as long as we keep buying more collections, the work will go on and on.

The Future

This is just the beginning. The future is sure to be more of everything just discussed: more English and Chinese language e-book purchases; more local digitisation of books dealing with Hong Kong and China; more use of e-books for teaching, learning and research; and more work to select, acquire, catalogue, and circulate e books. This will all take place within a new environment in which Google, Yahoo, and others will provide the world with literally millions of e-books: some free so that the providers can sell advertising, some where you pay each time a book is read, some which require you to pay for your own electronic or printed copy, and even some that for which you rent access. E-books themselves are also bound to improve, to achieve their multimedia potential, to be linked via the web to databases and e-journal articles, and to be included in all sort of personalised interfaces which make their use more effective. The day is not too distant when e-books will be integrated with all the other functions that are finding their way into today's handheld devices. E-books are easy to convert compared to movies, telephone messages, emails, online calendars, etc. Within a year or so it will probably be conceivable that we will read the morning newspaper, watch TV, watch a video podcast, make phone calls, etc., etc., and read both fiction and non fiction books using the same device – which you can take with you and switch from watching/reading to listening by pushing a button. Yet, I believe that there will be many times that this equipment will be set aside for the pleasure of reading print on paper.

Dr. Anthony W. Ferguson
University Librarian