Build a Better E-Book: A Wish List for Academic Reading

The following post developed out of many frustrated and fruitless attempts to use e-books for academic research and educational purposes, and more recently from conversations between Bookaneers Freeda and Althea. This is specifically about using e-books for academic and educational purposes, and specifically not about reading for leisure. 

Anyone who has tried to do research in e-books has probably experienced many of the same frustrations we have. The interfaces are clunky and confusing, it is difficult to browse or "berrypick" within the books, you are most likely reading on your computer, and the list goes on. This is exactly the opposite of the experience reading a paper book. Paper books are simple, intuitive, and pleasurable to read, and they all operate in exactly the same manner. 

What we want is optimum functionality: for e-books to take the best aspects of paper books and the many possibilities of digital. We want uniformity across platforms that includes the ability to customize your reading experience. And we would like it happen in substantially less than the several hundred years it took for print publishers to standardize practices after the invention of the printing press. 

Below is our list of "demands": what we would like from academic e-book publishers. We would also love for this to be an ongoing conversation. Librarians, researchers, students, by all means, let us know what your experiences using e-books for research and education have been. Which functions work, which do not? What are your demands?

Hyperlinks

One of the major differences between reading for pleasure and reading for learning is that academic reading tends to be less linear. It is much more common to jump around, refer back to previous passages, and of course to use all of the additional information and material included in the book. E-book platforms and devices for academic reading should hyperlink footnotes, endnotes, citations, tables of content, and indexes. Most importantly this includes being able to jump from the text to the endnote and back again. Ideally, it would also be much easier to bookmark a section and quickly jump back and forth between passages in the text.

Text that is searchable, highlightable, and copyable

These features are more common in e-book reading platforms, but not universal. Freeda recently tried to copy a passage from an e-book in EBSCO in order to use the information for future reference, but she was unable. These kinds of technological controls are meant to prevent "unauthorized" or "illegal" use of the materials, but in an academic setting prevent perfectly legal, even desirable, uses and stifle productivity.

Consortium lending privileges 

The inability to lend e-books to students at other libraries is another casualty of the transition from physical ownership to digital leasing. Legally, libraries are able to lend the books they own to whomever they wish. But in the digital environment, we no longer own books. We sign licensing agreements. This allows publishers to assert all kinds of controls and limitation over how we use the content. Publishers have long been opposed to the First Sale Doctrine, which allows the owner of a book or a CD or any other item to sell that item to someone else, without paying the publisher. However, now that we do not own these books, we cannot lend them outside of our institutions and we cannot sell them when we are finished with them.

For libraries, the implications of not being able to lend e-books to consortium students are momentous, especially as we make efforts to increase our digital collections. Libraries join consortia in order to save money and still provide access to adequate resources, but as we shift more of our monograph purchases toward e-books, we are perhaps unintentionally decreasing the value of consortium memberships.  

There has been some progress on designing new lending options for consortia lending, but it is one among many lending options that is not available for all titles from all publishers.  The result is that students who attempt to use e-books are only presented with the confusing array of appearances and functionality of e-books if they can get into them in the first place.  A federated catalog displays e-books from consortium institutions and sometimes will and sometimes will not allow students into the book from those results.  If students already find the process of finding a book through the library complicated and confusing, we are only managing to make it worse through our e-book acquisition. 

Portability

Though academic reading is different than leisure reading, there are some areas where the features and abilities of leisure reading platforms (like the Kindle) would be beneficial for academic readers as well. Students should be able to download an e-book to their e-reader, tablet, or smart phone, and then access the content off-line, just as public library users can download e-books. In some cases this may mean making a work available in a variety of formats to facilitate use on different e-reader devices.

Permanence  

As we mentioned above, publishers of e-books have found ways to eliminate the pesky features associated with physical books, like ownership and the First Sale Doctrine. However, when those physical attributes work in publishers’ favor, they are happy to reproduce that feature digitally. Some publishers develop into the licensing agreements for e-books a maximum number of uses, so after the book has been checked out X many times it disappears from the collection. This is meant to mimic the deterioration of physical books. Here again, we should be taking advantage of the freedom associated with the digital format, and not build the bugs of physical books into the new medium.

Bottom line: Get rid of DRM
Many of the things we have mentioned above may fall under the heading of digital rights management. Publishers and platforms have different approaches to digital rights management for ebooks. Some publishers offer e-books more or less free of digital limitations. You can print or download whole chapters as PDFs. Others put up more barriers to access and use.

Say what you will about the need for protecting intellectual property, for us all of this DRM in libraries is rehashing territory we covered decades ago. Publishers have always had an uneasy, or even hostile, relationship with libraries. In the decades when public libraries were being built all over the country, publishers feared that libraries would ruin the market for books, and some publishers took legal action. Fortunately for everyone, they were not successful in curbing the functions of libraries. What was the impact of libraries on the book market? Libraries have created generations of literate, intellectually curious, book-reading citizens. Libraries have created more customers for book stores and publishers, not fewer.

The truth is, as online piracy becomes more widespread, and students become more technologically literate, readers will get their books without these restrictions--but they won't get them from libraries, and they won't get them from publishers, they'll get them on the black market.  If we want readers to use good sources, ethically, we need to provide them with resources that are useable and make sense--which simply means granting them access to their fair use rights in e-book form.

The ideas behind DRM are the same basic fear-based approach publishers historically have taken towards libraries, and it is based a flawed understanding of knowledge, and on knowledge acquisition. As Althea posted last week, reporting on a talk by Barbara Fister, "the resources that we offer are, in fact, renewed by use rather than depleted by it." Publishers should recognize that we add value by circulating these resources widely, and modify their services accordingly.