As the University Librarian notes in her contribution to this newsletter, print books will always be dear to our hearts and will remain a crucial element of a research library collection. And we will continue to devote a significant proportion of our budget to developing and maintaining that collection. At the same time, it is undeniable that the users of our library collections are demanding that books be available to them electronically. More and more, the community wishes to have access to content at any time and any place. eBooks can respond to a multitude of needs: those of the distance user or a night-owl student (or prof!) providing more choices for library users with disabilities, and augmenting the e-reserve collection.
In fact, the Libraries jumped on the eBook bandwagon a number of years ago. At first, eBooks might have focussed on the usual suspects – computing science via Safari, recent academic books in a variety of disciplines offered via Netlibrary and of course, we mustn’t forget about government publications. Steadily, the numbers of these eBook resources have grown such that now, if you were to search the York Libraries catalogue for the “electronic book” format, you’d get a results list of more than 150,000! Some of this large increase can be attributed to important acquisitions like Early English Books Online (reported in a previous issue of News You Can Use and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (described in depth in this issue).
But progress doesn’t stop there! The eBook industry continues to gain momentum as publishers and vendors respond to growing demand from libraries – both public and academic. They experiment with different access and pricing models – some want to treat eBooks like ejournals and ask us to subscribe,while others are willing to permit perpetual access. Some have restrictions about printing and downloading; most offer some ability to annotate and highlight content. One thing they share, however, is the recognition that eBooks are here to stay. We know that too, as we observe more and more of you and your students jumping on that same bandwagon.
