After our frustrating experience with the latest e-book we have purchased I found that the highlighted sentences (below) from this article summed up my own feelings on e-books in the RU Library!
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"....With the price of textbooks rising, and institutions building their
space in the online learning environment, it’s reasonable to expect an
increase in the number of eTextbooks on our syllabi. For those
institutions that purchase textbooks for reserves, the lending issue
takes on an even more immediate concern. With Ingram’s VitalSource
platform delivering 80,000 digital textbooks in 17 languages to 1.6
million students and faculty at 6000 campuses in 180 countries
(according to The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections), we will need to figure out ways of making eBooks work in the academic research process more seamlessly.
We are ten years in to the eBook revolution and we’ve learned a lot.
Unfortunately, most of the tools on the market are designed to silo
users into a branded experience with a specific vendor-driven tool. Big
companies have big reasons to keep users in their walled gardens. Being
aware of the issues is one thing, but we, as academic librarians, need
to find ways to ensure that the needs of the academic researcher do not
get lost in the currently consumer-focused marketplace."
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