Introduction

Online journals have firmly established themselves as essential resources for libraries and their users, but—despite the primacy of the book as an information source in most disciplines—electronic books (e-books) have not found the same favour. The potential of e-books to support learning activity has been acknowledged, and new services have emerged (and disappeared) in recent years, but uptake has been slow. Snowhill’s overview [1 ] in the July/August 2001 issue of D-Lib Magazine noted that some elements key to the success of the e-books market were still taking shape, and this article, while primarily a case study, updates progress in many of these areas and reports actual user experience in academic libraries.

In summer 2001 the Librarians of the Conference of Heads of Irish Universities (CHIU) established a working group to assess the e-books market and to examine the potential of this medium for university libraries, along with any constraints. The key findings of the group in April 2002 were that the market was in a state of flux, uptake was inhibited by poor on-screen presentation and limited availability of titles while licencing models were highly varied. There was, however, a definite feeling that e-books could support learning activities in certain subjects (e.g. business, law, computer science) where information is structured in relatively discrete blocks and where a high premium is placed on currency. The group recommended a one-year subscription to an e-books service, and it was decided to focus on business and computing, two closely linked areas with strong teaching programmes at all seven universities [2 ]. Safari Tech Books Online emerged as the unanimous choice. The group committed itself to using the subscription period to explore issues for libraries, particularly access, licencing and cost-effectiveness, and for users, emphasising the exploitation of Safari for teaching and learning. This article reports findings from library and user perspectives, seeking to relate them to other studies and services and to future e-book development. It begins with an overview of the Safari service.

Safari Tech Books Online

Safari [3 ] is owned jointly by Pearson Education and O’Reilly and offers the full text of 2,000 titles, growing at about 50 books monthly. O’Reilly is a leading information technology (IT) publisher while Pearson has a number of well-known imprints in IT and business, including Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall and Sams. There is an unmistakably practical rather than theoretical focus, reflecting the origins of Safari as a service targeted at individual IT professionals rather than the multi-user academic market. The service is delivered via the Web with text in HTML format, requiring no add-on software or specialist hardware. Its interface (Figure 1) is clearly presented, facilitating searching of all subscribed titles simultaneously or of the currently selected title only. A navigation bar on the left of the screen enables users to browse by book subject or by section of the current book. Display of results shows the most relevant sections within any matching book. Text is presented in sections, typically corresponding to three pages of the printed book. This gives faster download times but prevents access to a whole chapter at once and inhibits printing or saving to disk, a modus operandi that suits publishers better than users.

Figure 1. Sample full-text display in Safari

As already noted, Safari is offered to individual and corporate subscribers, including over 400 academic libraries [4 ]. Bond University in Australia offers an interesting study of both library and individual student subscriptions [5 ]. Users can fit the number of titles subscribed to their budget. Thus the Irish universities, each with an allocation of 2500, have typically purchased a year’s access to about 50 titles unique to each institution. In fact subscribers purchase slots rather than titles, each book being assigned any value from half to three slots according to factors such as its date of publication, topicality and print cost. Unlimited concurrent user access is not offered, and there is a trade-off to be made between the numbers of titles and user licences purchased. A real plus in the subscription model is the opportunity to swap any title after 30 days. This feature is unique to Safari and offers the flexibility to delete low-use titles in favour of replacements likely to be in higher demand or to vary the subscription between semesters. There is no option to purchase titles outright or to retain access to subscribed editions beyond the subscription period.

Managing a Library E-Book Subscription

A variety of considerations for libraries emerged in managing the subscription, notably customer support, limited concurrent usage, cost-effectiveness, resource discovery and usage monitoring.

Customer support

A lengthy supply chain has been a source of communication difficulties. The owners of Safari have opted to delegate marketing to libraries to ProQuest Information and Learning. ProQuest in turn until recently concentrated support expertise for this service in the US and required customers in Ireland to route all queries through its UK office. This created significant delays in resolving queries, with an inordinate amount of time consumed in e-mail correspondence and in clarifying what one party wanted or another was advising. The complexity of the licencing model and the origins of Safari as a service for individuals rather than libraries exacerbated these problems, leading to expectations, misunderstandings or issues of scalability that required input from staff at Safari Books Online, LLC itself. A simple example is the inability of the customer to change the inactivity timeout setting to facilitate better licence usage in a multi-user environment. The recent transfer of support expertise to the UK has shortened the chain, but there has been a considerable time cost in reaching this situation.

Concurrent usage

Unlimited concurrent user access has become the norm for library e-resource subscriptions. Users are not accustomed to being debarred from a database or e-journal because all licences are in use. For e-books the situation is different. Publishers are protective of the market for student textbooks and fear its erosion through online access. Thus Safari subscribers must decide how many concurrent user licences to purchase, knowing that at peak periods this will never be enough and that more licences will mean fewer titles, assuming that there is a fixed budget. Users must also experience the frustration of having books presented on screen in small chunks rather than whole chapters in order to prevent irresponsible printing or saving to disk. There is a strong perception that the interests of publishers are being served at the expense of those of users who are in some way mistrusted. Such restrictions inhibit the uptake of e-books.

Users at a site with three concurrent users, as is the case at National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway, can expect to experience a lot of turnaways at busy times. In Galway’s case one session in four has been unsuccessful on average. The onus is on library staff to monitor usage carefully, adjusting the inactivity timeout period downwards at peak periods. As already noted, such a change requires a support call when immediate local action is really needed. Our user survey showed that a third of respondents experienced turnaways, and many commented on this as a particular source of dissatisfaction. For libraries there has been a need to engage in lengthy dialogue with the supplier in order to clarify and lobby for improvements in Safari’s session management model.

Cost-effectiveness

Safari has proved tremendously popular with users at each of the Irish universities. Usage statistics for NUI Galway show over 10,000 hits (i.e. book sections retrieved) in two semesters. It is interesting to compare the online subscription with the traditional print model in terms of cost-effectiveness. Returning to the concurrency issue, the comparison may appear unfavourable for e-books. NUI Galway initially purchased a three-user licence for 54 titles at a cost of 2,610 annually. The cost per title is therefore 48.33. Because licencing is applied to the whole subscription rather than on a per-title basis, it only needs three active users to render the rest of the collection inaccessible. This contrasts with print where every title or each copy of every title could be in use simultaneously. The cost of Galway’s annual subscription would purchase outright a significant number of printed titles that the library would own. On this basis, print would seem to offer better value for money.

This comparison with print is, however, too literal. A printed book is often inaccessible to other users through its removal from the shelf for borrowing or in-library consultation. By contrast the average length of a user session in Safari is seven minutes according to our supplier. In fact, this figure is just below five minutes for NUI Galway and has not been exceeded at any of the other six universities. The result is that many more users can access a particular title in any 24-hour period than for print. The facility to search for text in all subscribed titles at once brings more titles into play, enabling fuller exploitation of the online collection. A notable finding in our user survey is that just over half of the respondents indicate that they use a wider range of titles in Safari than they would consult in the library.

The ability to swap subscribed titles after 30 days provides the opportunity for dynamic collection management. To take another local example, a lecturer at NUI Galway wished to add two new titles on Java at the start of the second semester. The library substituted these for two low-use titles identified by the lecturer. One of the new additions has established itself as the most used title in the subscription, while nobody has queried the loss of access to the titles replaced.

Title swapping in Safari is straightforward, taking about a minute per book. This is much faster than ordering print books and satisfies user demand promptly even when, as often happens, the library is informed of new course needs at very short notice. In a fast-moving field where books date quickly (for example, texts about specific versions of individual software packages), content may be viewed as disposable after a certain period. It may make sense to provide access online rather than to process the printed version, give it expensive shelf space and subsequently (often belatedly) withdraw it from stock as part of a labour-intensive weeding programme. There will also be ongoing savings in terms of activities such as lending, shelving and repair [6 ]. In general, our project has found that swapping works very well in IT subjects and that the ability to generate dynamic and well-exploited online collections makes for a good return on investment.

Resource discovery

E-books need to be discoverable, and one obvious route is via the library catalogue. Safari supplies MARC records for subscribed titles at no extra charge, each including an 856 field linking to the full text, and some of the Irish universities opted to use these. Initially the records supplied were not of full MARC standard, and local editing was required to correct some basic deficits (e.g. author name supplied as shown on title page rather than inverted). From a customer perspective this was clearly unsatisfactory, but full MARC records are now provided. The process of downloading records from the Safari Back Office administration system and uploading to local catalogue databases can be cumbersome, and regular swapping necessitates familiarity with this operation along with deletion or suppression of records for titles dropped from the subscription.

Provision of title-level access via library or other Web sites is more straightforward. Administrators can use Back Office to generate an alphabetical list in HTML format of subscribed titles with embedded links to each book. This listing supplements standard links to the Safari home page on library Web sites. Interestingly, our user survey showed the library Web site as by far the most popular route of access to Safari. Over 60% of respondents regularly access the service via the library Web site, some distance ahead of the library catalogue at 19%. Given the greater investment of staff time involved in providing catalogue records, their relatively minor role as a route of access is disappointing. This contrasts with the experience at University of Texas at Austin [7 ] where the addition of catalogue records was found to boost e-book usage significantly. Also disappointing is the finding that only 13% of users regularly access Safari via their lecturer’s course Web site. The project has been particularly interested in promoting access via Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as Blackboard and Web CT. VLEs are increasingly popular at each institution and offer an ideal opportunity to bring Safari to the attention of students, not least because links can point to the exact section of a book relevant to any given point in the course.

Usage statistics

Generating reports using Back Office is a straightforward process. Administrators can set any reporting period required, copy data to other applications and provide output as XML. Safari offers a range of reports, of which those most commonly used have been hits per title, number of turnaways and a summary table of session activity, including average length and number of queries and section retrievals. An example is shown in Figure 2. In general the statistics supplied have assisted the identification of peaks, troughs and major shifts in patterns of uptake. For example, usage at NUI Galway more than doubled in the second semester as Safari became more established with students and faculty alike, and the profile of most heavily used titles changed completely, an experience noted by other consortium members also.