E-textbook use, information seeking behaviour and its impact: Case study business and management
David Nicholas and Ian Rowlands Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER), University College London, UK
Hamid R. Jamali Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER); Department of Library and Information Studies, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Tarbiat Moallem University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract. This paper evaluates the e-book usage and information seeking and reading behaviour of thousands of business and management students. Comparisons are made with students in other subjects. The data largely come from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded National e-Books Observatory (NeBO) project as well as the JISC User Behaviour Observational Study. The main sources of data were: a) transactional logs obtained from the MyiLibrary platform regarding 127 UK universities; b) questionnaire data for more than 5000 students and staff at these universities; c) hard-copy library circulation and retail sales data; and d) focus groups held with 50 staff and students from selected universities. The main findings were that e-textbooks can prove to be extremely popular and widely used, mainly for obtaining snippets of information and for fact finding. The main reason for using e-textbooks was ease of access and convenience.
Keywords: deep log analysis; e-books; UK; university students; usage
1. Background The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) National e-Books Observatory (November 2007 to March 2009) (NeBO) was probably the biggest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the use, information seeking and reading behaviour of UK university students and certainly the biggest study of the impact of scholarly e-book use ever conducted. The general aim of the project Correspondence to: Hamid R. Jamali, Department of Library and Information Studies, Faculty of Psychology and Education, Tarbiat Moallem University, No. 49, Mofateh Ave, PO Box 15614, Tehran, Iran. Email:
[email protected]
Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and Permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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was to ‘test the water’ nationally with e-course textbooks and to fast forward their take-up. Essentially JISC negotiated with publishers to provide, via the MyiLibrary and Ovid platforms, 36 course text e-books free to the UK university academic community (127 institutions) for a sufficiently long period of time (14 months) to establish their impact. CIBER were commissioned to evaluate how this was viewed by students, academic staff and librarians in order to transfer knowledge acquired in the project to publishers, aggregators and libraries to help stimulate an e-books market that has appropriate business and licensing models [1]. The ultimate goal was to try to unblock the access problems students in the UK currently experience when trying to obtain key course texts, a topic of major concern to students, and something which can lead to negative academic outcomes. With the ‘student experience’ fast rising up the university (and government) policy agenda, student and parental complaints about access to key course texts is not something that can be ignored for much longer. The 36 e-textbooks were intended for four key subject communities – business and management, engineering, media studies and medicine. These were areas in which JISC thought there were particular problems. E-books for the first three subjects were offered on the MyiLibrary platform and those for medicine on the Ovid platform.
2. Aims and objectives The broad aim of this paper is to explore the NeBO findings in respect to a single subject community in order to demonstrate the rich information yield and insights that deep log analysis, supported by questionnaire and focus group, can bring to evaluations of e-book use and its impact. Business and management (on the MyiLibrary) was chosen as the exemplar because: • its users appeared to benefit most from the e-book experiment – they were the ‘super users’, and as a result their success could provide best practice lessons for the information community • the subject constitutes a strategic area from an information science perspective because this is a subject area which has an obvious need for high-quality information. The specific objectives are to: 1. Furnish detailed digital ‘footprints’ (logs) of students from 127 UK universities in respect to their use and information seeking and reading behaviour in connection with the five business and management e-textbooks. These MyiLibrary footprints provide data on: a) volume, duration and timing of use; b) where use took place; c) individual book titles used; d) location of use; e) type of page viewed; f) institutional and subject diversity; g) scatter of use; h) nature of use; and i) method of searching/navigating. The unique character of business management usage and seeking is established through comparisons with other JISC case study subject fields – media studies and engineering. For more on the digital footprint concept see [2]. 2. Provide tabulated questionnaire data from entry and exit surveys for staff and students in business and management at the participating institutions in order to explain, contextualize and corroborate the use and information seeking behaviour recorded in the logs, and to establish its impact. Particularly in respect to: a) degree of e-book use; b) session length; c) amount of text read (e.g. whole chapter/book, abstract); d) frequency of e-book use and whether it is growing; e) offcampus use of the digital library; and f) reasons for e-book use. Data were segmented by type of university, age, gender and status (in regard to the latter, to differentiate between staff and student behaviours) 3. Furnish added ‘raw’ insights into the e-book behaviour and attitudes (e.g. advantage and disadvantages of e-book use) of business and management students and faculty from an analysis of more than a thousand free-text comments furnished as part of the questionnaire surveys mentioned above.
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4. Obtain, via student and staff focus groups, an understanding of work patterns as they relate to e- and p-books, attitudes to reading, location and content discovery issues, added-value and onscreen design issues, impacts on teaching and learning, users’ views on the promotion of e-books, and purchasing behaviour. 5. Create, from 1–4 above, a profile of the heaviest or super users in order that best practices can be identified. 6. Compare e-usage of the e-textbooks with hard-copy sales and library loans to identify similarities, differences and impacts.
3. Literature review One of the earliest e-book studies [3] reviewed cumulative collection use data over a three-month period from the initial launch of Questia (a commercial online library collection) in late January 2001 through to April 2001. The total collection consists of 35,000 full-text monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Search logs and page view logs were analysed as to the characteristics of the search queries and browsing within titles. The number of page views by book reveals an expected pattern of few books with a large number of page views, and a large number of books with few page views. In total, 16,851 books of the 35,000 title collection had over 10 page views; 7,096 books had over 50 page views; 57 books had over 1,000 page views; three titles had over 3,000 page views, and the highest number of page views for a single title was 3,617. Within the 16,851 books with over 10 page views, the distribution of titles demonstrated a more smoothly extended tail than the investigators expected. The use distribution was not dramatically skewed, with many books having just over 10 page views. Given that the collection was designed for and marketed to undergraduates, the investigators expected that subject queries would somewhat mimic traditional library undergraduate use and needs. As evidenced by collection use, this turned out to be true. Literature was the most popular subject for research on Questia. This subject was most commonly represented at all levels of page view use. However, other studies generally show that e-books are most popular with business students. Thus a study of NetLibrary usage conducted at Auburn University Montgomery between 2000 and 2004 showed that books in the subject ‘business, economics and management’ were the most used titles with 1580 total accesses during the period. In total, 703 individual business titles were used [4]. Another survey of 2084 students and staff at two Australian universities showed that nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents from business said they had used e-books [5]. Business also attracts a higher level of e-book use than other subjects. Dillon [6, 7] at the University of Texas Austin examined usage reports for electronic books and found that books on economics and business received higher usage than e-books in most other subject areas. The study also found that these results were consistent across the various collections. Langston’s [8] study came up with similar findings. Covering a total of 23,000 NetLibrary titles in two collections (one leased and the other purchased), their study found that the most accessed subject area in the leased collection was economics and business, which accounted for 39% of all accesses. An examination of NetLibrary usage reports for Simmons College over the period (2001–2006) showed that the top six disciplines and subjects included business, economics, and management (1785 visits), general social sciences (1558), medicine (705), computer science (660), literature (559), and library science and publishing (537) [9]. Finally, a study of e-book usage statistics supplied by three e-book providers (including NetLibrary and Ebrary) at the University of Idaho in 2008 showed that the highest usage of e-books occurred in the category ‘business/economics’. In this subject, 1186 titles were used (total 3425 uses), which was equal to 17.4% of all titles in the subject that the library held. It should also be noted that the library held 6836 titles in this subject category which was more than the library’s holdings in any other subject [10].
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Another study of a collection of 303 NetLibrary e-books at Victoria University and its consortium of 12 campuses in 2001 showed that the most popular subjects used were business and economics, and computer science [11]. Finally, the SuperBook project [2], which constituted the pilot for NeBO, sought to investigate the impact of the introduction of e-books to the University College London (UCL) scholarly community using deep log analysis. Usage of Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) was examined over a threemonth period. In all, 1277 sessions were conducted and 10,678 pages viewed during January to March 2007. Most of those who found the service viewed a relatively large number of pages. Well over half of all sessions saw more than four pages viewed, and one in nine saw more than 10 pages viewed. Furthermore, a good proportion of users took advantage of the rich choice of titles available, with one in four sessions seeing more than three books viewed. Over two-thirds of usage took place on site. There were differences between on-site and off-site users. Off-site users adopted a more direct approach: nearly three quarters of views were to full-text pages; the figure for on-site users being just over half. Furthermore, off-site users were more likely to view an e-book with one in 10 sessions not recording a view to a book as compared to four in 10 for on-site users. It was hypothesized that the differences may reflect access expectation on the part of the users. Users within UCL expected the service to be maintained hence they just browsed to see what was there with the intention of accessing the books later, at a time when they wanted to use them. Those people accessing via a search engine were most likely to record more views in a session and were more likely to view text pages. Forty-five per cent of use of e-books was accounted for by titles published three to six years ago. Catalogued books were much more likely to be used, in the case of UCL catalogued e-books they attracted over twice the usage as compared to non-catalogued books.
4. Methodology The project employed a range of methods to provide a very detailed, 360-degree understanding of e-books and the types of use, information seeking behaviour and impacts that are associated with them: • Deep log analysis, which delivered the minute details of use and information seeking behaviour of students and staff and also raised the questions that needed asking in questionnaire and interview. • Online questionnaires, which were used to obtain background data on potential e-book users, to provide general contextual e-book data on use and behaviour, and to obtain confirmation of the data found in the logs. • Focus groups, which provided a deeper understanding of the ways in which e-textbooks were used by students and academic staff in order to enrich and enhance the log data. 4.1. Deep log analysis Raw transactional log data were obtained from the MyiLibrary platform for the 26 titles for the period November 2007 to March 2009 and processed using deep log techniques pioneered by Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) to describe usage and information seeking behaviour in the digital space. The following provides an example of a line from the transactional server log file: 2007–12–01 04:33:38 GET /browse/open.asp – 139.184.30.131 HTTP/1.0 Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+ Windows+NT+6.0;+fr;+rv:1.8.1.11)+Gecko/20071127+Firefox/2.0.0.11 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ library/resources/e-books.php www.myilibrary.com
The first two fields furnish the time stamp of when the file was sent to the user’s computer. The next field provides the time downloaded and describes the type of page; here /browse/open.asp
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refers to the home page. The field following is the internet protocol (IP) number, which is a numeric address that is provided to users connected to the internet. The numbers were processed and the domain name server (DNS) or registered details of the corresponding IP was looked up via a reverse DNS lookup procedure. DNS registration provides categories for organizations to register under, thus .ac for academic organizations. “Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+6.0;+fr;+rv:1.8.1.1 1)+Gecko/20071127+Firefox/2.0.0.11” identifies the type of browser of the client machine. The field http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/resources/e-books.php is the referrer field and gives the web site and page details of the previous page viewed by the user. In this case this was a page of e-book resources or links at the University of Sussex. The log data were analysed using SPSS to create a series of user metrics that describe how users interact with the system. These data reflect what people actually do online not what they think they did, and not what they think they ought to say to a researcher. A further advantage of deep log analysis is that it is possible to avoid sampling biases and errors: virtually everyone and everything is recorded. More information on the processes involved with deep log analysis can be found at [12, 13]. A number of important definitions were used in the analysis: • Use. Three ‘use’ metrics were employed – number of pages viewed, number of sessions conducted and amount of time spent online, in order to obtain more accurate estimates of e-book activity. The calculation of the number of pages viewed was limited to book content use and includes views to book covers, book table of contents, foreword pages and text pages. This was because title identifiers were not available for navigational and some search pages, hence use of these pages could not be identified except at the session level. E-book content pages do not always equate with a print page but in the case of the MyiLibrary this was in fact the case. Page view time is estimated by the difference in time between one page and the next page viewed. No estimate can be generated for the last page viewed in a session, because no log off is recorded. Session time includes views to menus. • Users. Users are individual universities and there was a need to identify use emanating from specific UK universities. UK universities were identified by IP range(s) of each university largely provided by the JISC. It was not possible to distinguish in the logs between student and staff use, but this is not thought to be a major problem, possibly inflating student use by between 5–10%. • E-book identification. E-books were identified by a reference number given in the transactional log files and this enabled JISC-provided titles to be identified. 4.2. Questionnaire surveys Two large-scale online user surveys were conducted in the period January to March in 2008 and 2009, with the earlier survey forming a benchmark against which to monitor change. We do not know whether the people filling in the first questionnaire also filled in the second. The questionnaire was piloted extensively and distributed to participating libraries as a web link to the survey database (Survey Monkey Professional). Libraries used a variety of methods to disseminate the invitation to join the survey: from direct mailings to links on library home pages or inclusion in staff and student newsletters. The exercise generated 52,154 usable responses altogether, making it almost certainly the largest survey into e-book use, attitudes and behaviour ever conducted. Although the sample frame was a convenience sample, the size of the response and its demographic profile, mean that we can be fairly sure that the findings reported may be generalized across the whole UK higher education sector. Log data were compared with two sets of data which were assembled for the project: • Library circulation of hard copies. Data on numbers of loan copies of the equivalent printed course texts were collected from a sample of 37 universities for the academic years 2006/07 (i.e. before the NeBO project) and for 2007/08, again using an online survey method. Since different institutions have different loan periods, a pragmatic decision was taken to record loan days (the
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total number of days that loan copies – of any status – were off the shelf and being borrowed) as a standard across institutions. • UK print sales data. Data on UK retail print sales at title level were supplied by Nielsen BookScan UK for calendar years 2007 and 2008. In practice, the JISC e-books did not come fully on stream until early 2008, so 2007 can reasonably be regarded as ‘before the experiment’. The sales data refer to UK sales of new copies through a panel of major booksellers, including Amazon. No information was available on the second-hand market, although this is likely to be a significant influence on purchasing behaviour. 4.3. Focus groups Topics included working patterns as they relate to e-books and p-books, attitudes to reading, selection (teachers only), location and content discovery issues, added-value and on-screen design issues, impacts on teaching and learning, users’ views on the promotion of e-books, and purchasing behaviour (students only). Separate focus groups of students and academics (of between two and eight people) were held at 10 of the universities involved in the NeBO experiment. Just over 50 people were interviewed in all.
5. Results 5.1. User profile One hundred and twenty seven higher education institutions took part in the experiment and comprised the NeBO project. There are 109 official universities in the UK so essentially the e-book experiment involved, in theory, the whole UK university community of 1.6 million students. However, it is likely that the books offered only appealed to the four subject communities for which the books were intended (the questionnaire survey provided confirmation of that). In the case of business and management there were 40,425 studying in 2007/08 and virtually all had potential access to the e-books. Of course the JISC books would not have been relevant to them all or indeed students might not have been aware of them. Logs only provide us with a very superficial idea of who the e-book users were (their institutional affiliation was known), so for a better picture we have to turn to the questionnaires. Indeed, the questionnaires provided demographic and attitudinal data on 5519 students who described their subject interest as business and management. Of course, not all used the e-books on offer. In fact the exit survey found that 13.8% of business and management students (n = 2892) said they had used one of the JISC business and management texts in e-book form.1 Also 10% (394) of the university staff who took part in the surveys described their teaching interests as business and management. The questionnaire yielded general demographic data on business and management students. Female students, perhaps surprisingly, outnumbered men in business studies, as in many other subjects today, by a significant margin. As might be expected, given the nature of the subject, business studies courses contain a relatively high proportion of part-time students to a much greater extent than the three other subjects covered by the JISC collections e-books experiment. 5.2. Usage The questionnaires and two log metrics (page views and number of page views per session) furnish data on use. The questionnaires provided both general information on e-book use and specific data on JISC book use. They showed that business and management students were the most likely group to have used any e-book. Sixty-nine per cent said they had used e-books against 68% for engineering and 63% for media studies. Not only were business students more likely to use e-books, their Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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use of them was increasing at a higher rate than that for the other subjects. Thus, take-up of e-books increased from 66.6% to 71.4% (a growth rate of nearly 5%) between the two surveys. By comparison, the growth figures for the other two subjects were: a) engineering – growth rate 1.1%; and b) media studies – growth rate 3.5%. Interestingly, business lecturers used e-books less than their academic colleagues from other subjects. Thus 59% had used e-books while the figure for media studies was 70%. Business lecturers’ use of e-books, however, increased by nearly 5% between the two surveys; even so this growth level was eclipsed by that of medical staff (nearly 7%). The questionnaires provided further evidence that business and management were big users of e-books generally. They showed them to be the most frequent users of e-books with 19.4% having read more than five titles in the past month as opposed to 19.2% for engineering students and 15.9% for media studies. It comes as no surprise therefore to discover that the MyiLibrary logs showed that, of the three subjects covered, business and management e-books received the highest volume of use (see Table 1 for the list of titles). The five business titles (constituting 20% of the population of JISC e-books) accounted for 45% of page views; this represented around 342,450 views over the 14-month survey period – impressive volumes of use. Their relative popularity can be put down to a number of factors: a) the books were more attractive to university users; b) the nature of the subject meant that e-books are especially attractive, and the literature reviews suggest this to be the case; c) staff and librarians promoted them more; d) dissatisfaction with hard-copy provision – the questionnaire showed that business students were much more likely to be dissatisfied with the level of print textbooks available to them; e) there were simply more students studying business and management in the UK. Thus in 2007/08 there were 40,425 students compared to 34,715 for engineering and 8730 for media studies; they therefore accounted for around 48% of the total student population for these three subjects. Table 1 JISC business and management e-textbooks Blyton and Turnball, The Dynamics of Employee Relations, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (3rd edn) Hannagan, Management Concepts and Practices, Pearson Education, 2004 (4th edn) Hooley, Saunders and Piercy, Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning, Pearson Education, 2003 (3rd edn) Pickton and Hudson Broderick, Integrated Marketing Communication, Pearson Education, 2004 (2nd edn) Rollinson, Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach, Pearson Education, 2004 (3rd edn)
By way of contrast, engineering, which made up about half (53%) of the JISC e-books, accounted for less than a quarter (23%) of page views, while the seven media studies titles (27% of the e-books) accounted for about a third (32%) of views. In terms of page views in a session, business users actually scored relatively low, with 31% of sessions recording views to more than 10 pages; this compares to the 46% recorded by those viewing a combination of subjects and 40% for media (Figure 1). This is possibly explained by the more factual nature of business e-books, ease of zeroing in on them and the relative ease with which information is lifted from them. 5.3. Individual title analysis Overall, the NeBO generated nearly three quarters of a million of page views for the 26 titles on MyiLibrary. Not surprisingly the most popular individual JISC title was in fact a business title, Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach, which attracted 82,787 page views in the 14-month survey period (Table 2). The third, fourth and fifth most used titles were also business titles and all attracted more than 74,000 views. The book that increased its use most over the survey period was Integrated Marketing Communication; its use increased from about 14% of business use (December 2007) to 37% (May 2008). Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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In the exit survey 2892 business and management students said they had used one of the JISC business and management texts in e-book form.2 With respect to the popularity of individual titles the questionnaire data largely concurred with the logs: • The Dynamics of Employee Relations was the least used, by 511 students in the entry survey and 572 in the exit survey. A questionnaire to staff in the observatory institutions found that this title was recommended by 11.4% of business and management faculty with 6% strongly recommending it. Recommendations increased by 2.2% between surveys, and strong recommendations by 4.3%. It was also the least used title according to the log analysis. • Integrated Marketing Communication was used by 660 students in the entry survey and 737 in exit survey. It was recommended by 16.2% business and management staff with 9.7% strongly recommending it. Recommendations increased by 5% between surveys, and strong recommendations by 4.5%. • Management Concepts and Practices was used by 667 students in the entry survey and 740 in exit survey. It was recommended by 16% of business and management staff with 8.6% strongly recommending it. Recommendations increased by 0.7% between surveys, and strong recommendations by 2.9% • Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning was used by 559 students in the entry survey and 870 in exit survey. The title was recommended by 13.8% of business and management staff with 7.5% strongly recommending it. Recommendations increased by 10% between surveys, and strong recommendations by 7.6%. This was the title whose use grew relatively the most during the experiment (by 52%). • Organisational Behaviour and Analysis proved to be the top book, used by 955 students in the entry survey and by 1068 in the exit survey. It was also the most strongly recommended e-book (by 21.1% of business and management staff with 11.2% strongly recommending it). Recommendations increased by 6.8% between surveys, and strong recommendations by 3.6%. Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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Table 2 Rank order by usage of the 26 JISC e-books n
%
Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach Media Gender and Identity
82,787 81,205
10.9 10.7
Management Concepts and Practices Integrated Marketing Communication Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts Power without Responsibility Chemical Engineering Volume 6: Chemical Engineering Design The Dynamics of Employee Relations Engineering Materials 1 Public Relations Handbook Structural and Stress Analysis Chemical Engineering Volume 2 Media Institutions and Audiences Measurement and Instrumentation Principles Aerodynamics for Engineering Students Engineering Materials 2 English for Journalists Writing for Journalists Fundamentals of Wireless Communication Modern Structural Analysis A Short Course in Foundation Engineering Better Places to Live Conceptual Structural Design A Short Course in Soil and Rock Slope Engineering Better Places to Work Total
77,746 77,298 74,018 62,574 42,013 36,541 31,833 27,634 23,584 18,608 15,112 14,623 13,273 12,391 11,319 9,676 9,620 8,883 8,264 5,725 5,001 4,944 3,736 2,944 761,352
10.2 10.2 9.7 8.2 5.5 4.8 4.2 3.6 3.1 2.4 2.0 1.9 1.7 1.6 1.5 1.3 1.3 1.2 1.1 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 100.0
This title was also the most popular title according to the logs. All the metrics pointed to this title being the most popular and successful. 5.3.1. Comparison of usage data with hard-copy sales and loans Book sales data from Bookscan for 2008 showed that the JISC titles sold 2907 hard copies and that the top title (Organisational Behaviour and Analysis) by log and questionnaire and by use and recommendation was also the one that sold the most hard copies (883). Also the title that was least popular according to log and questionnaire (The Dynamics of Employee Relations) sold the fewest titles (283). Interestingly, circulation data for 37 universities showed quite a different picture. Thus for 2008 Marketing Strategy obtained the greatest number of loans (24,150). However, the least used book by log and questionnaire, proved to be the book that attracted the fewest sales. The Dynamics of Employee Relations was also the least borrowed (12,361). Indeed, it seems that by all measures, this is a book that the JISC should probably not have bought for the NeBO. 5.4. Use over time In general, and in relative terms, business and management e-textbook usage was strongest in August 2008 when it accounted for 63% of all JISC e-book use and was weakest between February and April 2008 when it accounted for less than 40% of page views. Normally the use of e-books is Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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tied to the teaching year but this appears not to be necessarily true in the case in business, possibly because of the higher numbers of postgraduates in certain institutions, for example those with business schools. Figure 2 shows the monthly variation in share of the use of the five e-books. As previously noted, the book that recorded the most significant growth in usage was Integrated Marketing Communication, whose share increased from 14% in December 2007 to 38% in May 2008. Because of the wide variations in monthly use it is difficult to establish which titles grew most in use over the 14 months. However, if we compare December 2007 and 2008 the biggest winner was Organisational Behaviour and Analysis, which grew its year-to-year use by 7% and Marketing Strategy & Competitive Positioning, the biggest loser, with a drop of 10% in use. Each university of course had its own profile and Figure 3 shows that for the University of Liverpool, where Organisational Behaviour and Analysis made up over half of business title use between November 2007 and February 2008. Integrated Marketing Communication accounted for up to half of use in May 2008 while Management Concepts and Practices made up half of use in November 2008 and December 2008. 5.5. Time spent viewing/reading Page view and session time calculations derived from logs require a word of warning due to the fact that each page of the MyiLibrary e-book has to be viewed to examine content (something intended to prevent wholesale copying/printing) and this can lead to relatively short page view times and long session times. All e-book use (online use) is brief but relatively speaking business e-textbooks obtained more time from students, which probably suggest higher levels of satisfaction (Figure 4). Thus while most e-book pages were viewed for less than a minute a higher proportion of business pages (17%) were viewed for more than a minute. By comparison the figure for media was just 12%. Cover pages,
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39
9
50
80 70
9
8
NOV 08
OCT 08
DEC 08
Fig. 3. Percentage share of e-book page views for University of Liverpool by month.
unexpectedly, were viewed for the longest time and this is what we might call ‘dwell’ time, when users make relevant judgements or try to orientate themselves. Sessions where business and management titles only were viewed were longer: 59% lasted more than 12 minutes compared to just 51% for sessions where engineering and media studies books were viewed. Fewer business sessions lasted under 30 seconds, which probably meant most users were finding something of interest. When asked (in the questionnaire) about e-book reading times 39.2% of business and management students said they spent more than 20 minutes and 35% spent 11–20 minutes. The figures were essentially the same for all subjects. The discrepancy between logs and questionnaire data is probably explained by the fact that people do not remember how long they spend online. 5.6. Institutional diversity There was also significant institutional diversity. In general, the size of a university proved to be a good indicator of the level of e-book use. The top 10 universities accounted for over a quarter of all JISC title usage and half of usage was accounted for by the top 24 universities. The top five universities by JISC e-book usage were: Sheffield Hallam University, University of Sheffield, University of Glamorgan, University of Birmingham and University of Nottingham. Each one of these universities had a business school. There was a relatively high degree of concentration of use even in the case of individual titles. Thus, in the case of Management Concepts and Practices the top 10 (of 127) universities accounted for 36% of its use. The University of Glamorgan was the biggest user by some distance and viewed the title 3455 times (8% of all page views). 5.7. Location of use In regard to location of use, as indicated in the logs, a much higher proportion of business and management e-book sessions were conducted off-campus. Thus, while a third (32%) of UK Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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100 90
6 27
5
5
9
7 41
42
80 70 60
14
50 40
47
19
18
Page view time Over 5
30
3 to 5 min
20
26
23
1 to 3 min 10s to 1 min
10
5s under 10 sec Under 5 sec
0 Media
Business
Engineering
Fig. 4. Percentage share distribution of page view time by subject.
on-campus sessions viewed a business title this was true of nearly two-thirds (61%) of off-campus (UK), and three quarters of overseas, use. Given the high proportion of part-time business students represented in the survey, it is no surprise that business students prefer to access their university’s digital offerings mostly or entirely from home. There is evidence here of what the digital transition delivered, freedom to search the resource anywhere, anytime. This is a genuine academic outcome. 5.8. Searching/browsing and navigating behaviour The multiple routes to e-books confused students: federated search, aggregator/publisher website, virtual learning environment, library catalogue and e-reading list. The library catalogue/OPAC proved to be the main means of accessing e-textbooks. There was also relatively high use of e-reading lists as routes to finding e-books. Business users liked employing search to navigate towards e-book content. Thus sessions viewing a business title were about twice as likely to have used a search expression. In general, students using the search facility were more likely to view more than one e-book in a session and were also more likely to view more content pages in a session; the two tend to go hand in hand, of course. Sessions using a search facility were more likely to view over 20 pages, and this could be due to the scatter gun approach that search engines deliver. Advanced searching, as has been found to be universally the case [14], and the expanding of the table of contents were almost never used. Business and management users accessed e-books via virtual learning environments (VLE) much more frequently than users from other subjects: 305 sessions arose from a VLE as opposed to 74 for engineering and just 50 for media studies. It has to be said, though, accesses via VLEs were low generally, despite their obvious benefits in encouraging e-book (and journal) use. Generally, the e-book user was easily distracted and confused by the myriad navigational routes and display options, and the ability to move out of the e-book environment with ease and at will. It should be noted that the JISC e-books were not accessible via the students preferred retrieval tool, Google. Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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5.9. Nature of use E-textbooks were mainly used for obtaining snippets of information and fact finding. Business and management students showed in their questionnaire responses some differences to the general population of students in terms of the proportion of e-books read. The whole book was read by around 5% for both business and management and students from the other subjects. For whole chapters however, business and management students showed a higher proportion at 22.6% compared to 18.5% for other students who, in turn, showed higher rates of reading one chapter or dipping in and out of several. From logs, questionnaire and interview the evidence was that there was very little extended reading of e-books online. The preference was to print out material, something not made easy by the e-book platforms. Power browsing of multiple e-textbooks was characteristic, a function of massive choice. Not unexpectedly, high value was placed on the interactive features of e-textbooks, and also on the facility to search for information. The most important reason for using e-books was convenience of transporting and accessing them. E-books were used for a wide range of academic purposes and none predominated suggesting that function (e.g. searching for quick facts) or convenience may be more important than task. Business students were more conscious of the currency (or otherwise) of the e-textbooks. 5.10. Obtaining e-books Business students were the least likely to have said they bought their own copy of a textbook or to have obtained one from the open web. They showed the strongest tendency of any of the subject groups to use library-provided e-books. This tendency was noted before the NeBO project really got underway, so e-books appear to satisfy a real need. In general terms business students were very frequent visitors to their university digital library. 5.11. General impressions Business and management students were generally impressed with e-textbooks. In an open-ended question 61.4% of respondents offered positive opinions or experiences in regard to e-books. There was a significant improvement in positive e-book opinion between the two surveys, from 58.1 to 63.7%. Of course, it is possible for a respondent to offer both a positive and negative opinion at the same time (e.g. “e-books are a great idea but using them is cumbersome…”). In fact, 7.4% of respondents offered a mixed opinion and these people can be thought of as ‘floating voters’ who, if their concerns were addressed, could become positive e-book users. Students praised e-books on the grounds of: • Academic outcomes: “The e-books service provided by my university has been very useful and plays a crucial role on my studies.” • Unblocking access: “The more e-books the better since more students can use them at the same time!” • Portability: “I now own a Sony portable reader – this has revolutionized my reading habits. I find that being able to transport 160 e-books in one devise invaluable. I read on trains and in cafes.” • Remote access and academic outcomes: “E-books are a VERY good tool – you don’t have to worry about the availability of a certain book and they are also useful to me as I have to travel for an hour to get into Uni, so cutting out this journey to the library by accessing the book online is extremely useful to me and gives me more study time.” The most common complaints concerned: • Problems of getting hold of hard copies from library or other sources. • Need for more e-book titles. A quarter of respondents mentioned this. Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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• Difficulties of access. • Difficulties of reading. • Preference for hard copy. • Poor promotion. 5.12. Super users For university librarians perhaps the question they most wanted answered was who were the super users, who were the early leaders, the avid e-book users? We set about answering this question by profiling the big users and for the purposes of the exercise a big or ‘super user’ was defined as someone who had said in the questionnaire that they looked at five or more e-books within the four weeks leading into the two surveys [15]. They are compared with the rest of the student population using a simple chi-squared tool. The test starts from the assumption that there are no differences between heavier and lighter users unless the weight of evidence is so overwhelming that the differences cannot be simply explained away as chance except as a 1 in 100 freak event. The figures in brackets that follow are adjusted standard residuals, a measure of the sharpness of the difference between e-book ‘super users’ and the rest of the student population. As a rough guide a value of 2 or greater suggests a really meaningful difference; a value of less than two should be interpreted as ‘no difference’. Super users were most likely to be found in business and management (6.5). Our typical e-book ‘super user’ is rather older, typically they are in the age range 22–35 (6.9); also much more likely to be male (3.0) than female than the gender balance of their degree would suggest and many will be taught postgraduates on vocationally oriented programmes. By definition, super users view more e-book titles than other students but what is interesting is that they show a much stronger tendency to use them for study-related purposes (6.7) than other students and have a very strong preference for sourcing their e-book readings from their university library (12.7). Super users have e-books very firmly embedded as a key component in their learning. As well as reading from a wider range of titles, their session times are longer: they are much more likely to spend more than 20 minutes each time (8.9) and to use e-books more extensively, consuming whole books or at least several whole chapters (13.). The super user phenomenon cannot be explained by some ‘geek’ factor: they are no more or no less dependent on internet resources (–0.1) than any other student group when it comes to collecting information for coursework assignments. Nor is super use a function of online course delivery through managed or virtual learning environments: again, they are absolutely typical of other students in terms of their dependence on this information resource (0.2). Whereas lighter users of library provided e-books tend to discover these resources through the library catalogue (2.6), super users instead show a preference for navigating to e-book content via library web pages (2.3). 5.13. Impact on hard-copy sales Publishers wanted to know whether e-access to course texts impacts on print sales. Does, for instance, e-access cannibalize print sales? Or will the extra digital visibility afforded by projects like NeBO actually promote interest in the print version? Typically, textbook sales peak two or three years after publication before a long process of attrition sets in, ultimately triggering the need for a new edition to re-invigorate the marketplace. In the 12 months before NeBO went live, sales of 28 hard-copy textbooks as recorded by a panel of book shops and online retailers fell by 14.2% compared with the previous year. These data, collected by Nielsen BookScan, excluded eight titles that went into new editions during the course of the project, so that we can compare like with like throughout. After a further 12 months of ‘free’ e-access to those titles, retail sales were only 7.5% down on the previous year. In attempting to answer the question of whether print sales were impacted by NeBO we developed a testable hypothesis: how did sales of NeBO titles hold up against a basket of textbooks in the Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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same subject area published in the same year? Rather well, as it happens, and they generally ‘outperformed the market’ by just over 50%. We could not find any convincing case for e-access cannibalizing print sales; in fact, we found that downloads and sales were statistically independent of one another. Evidence is now beginning to build up from other studies (e.g. [16–18]) that supports our conclusion that e-access does not inevitably lead to a deterioration in print sales. More studies are needed, and on a grander scale for sure, to convince the sceptics, but the early straws in the wind appear to be positive for publishers and booksellers (and hence readers, of course).
Table 3 Rank order by percentage change in library hard copy circulation of 26 JISC e-books (n = 37 universities) 2006/07 loan days
2007/08 loan days
Percentage change
669
2,341
249.9
3,776
12,399
228.4
Modern Structural Analysis
136
357
162.5
Fundamentals of Wireless Communication
1,677
3,532
110.6
Structural and Stress Analysis
3,532
6,158
74.3
Aerodynamics for Engineering Students
2,965
5,041
70.0
Engineering Materials 2
3,943
6,338
60.7
Engineering Materials 1
4,942
6,651
34.6
Media Institutions and Audiences
2,262
2,956
30.7
Chemical Engineering Volume 2
4,663
5,516
18.3
A Short Course in Foundation Engineering
1,828
2,062
12.8
Better Places to Work
104
112
7.7
A Short Course in Soil and Rock Slope Engineering
998
1,030
3.2
Organisational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach
12,407
11,906
–4.0
Media, Gender and Identity
16,023
14,700
–8.3
Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning
24,150
21,763
–9.9
Writing for Journalists
6,911
6,163
–10.8
Public Relations Handbook
7,034
6,252
–11.1
Power Without Responsibility
14,286
10,398
–27.2
Integrated Marketing Communication
20,952
14,958
–28.6
The Dynamics of Employee Relations
12,361
8,596
–30.5
Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts
3,990
2,252
–43.6
Measurement and Instrumentation
1,118
596
–46.7
Conceptual Structural Design
700
359
–48.7
Management Concepts and Practices
16,926
5,143
–69.6
Better Places to Live
1,328 169,681
381 157,960
–71.3 –6.9
English for Journalists Chemical Engineering Volume 6: Chemical Engineering Design
Total
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5.14. Impact on library hard-copy circulation As well as looking at the impact on retail sales to publishers, the NeBO project also considered whether e-textbook provision made any difference in terms of whether people would still borrow library hard copies. Circulation data for all 26 JISC e-books were solicited by means of an online survey: 37 institutions were able to supply data for the academic years 2006/07 (before e-provision) and 2007/08 (after e-provision). The circulation metric used here is the aggregate number of days that all copies of the equivalent edition were out on loan (usually short loan). At the collection level, overall circulation fell by 6.7% but this hides enormous volatility both at the title level, as Table 3 clearly indicates, and at the subject level. In fact, for business and management titles, the drop in circulation was very significant, down 39.2%, which, combined with the very high levels of e-book use associated with this particular group, suggests that a considerable switch from print to electronic content took place within a short timeframe.
6. Conclusions The e-textbook behaviour of students and the impacts of this behaviour have been investigated in considerable depth. NeBO proved to be a big success, with virtually every university in the country joining together in a hugely strategic and methodologically innovative study; a study in which hundreds of thousands of students, nationwide, were provided with e-texts which they consumed with great alacrity, recording more than three quarters of a million page views in the 14-month experiment. The level of interest by students and staff was demonstrated by the fact that more than 50,000 of them responded to the questionnaires. Clearly the main lesson learnt was that if e-textbooks are of good quality, lecturers recommend and reference them in their e-reading lists and if they are made widely and easily accessible they will be used in large numbers. And the very large volumes of use (82,787 page views) associated with Organizational Behaviour and Analysis: An Integrated Approach is very much proof of that. The results of this study confirmed what we have found in the literature that business students are major and significant users of e-books and e-textbooks in that they view them more frequently, spend longer viewing them, view more of them and use is increasing fastest. Popularity could be put down to a number of factors: a) the books were more attractive to university users; b) the nature of business studies means that e-books are especially attractive; c) staff and librarians promote them more; and d) there are more business and management students. The other key findings of the study were: • E-textbook use did not appear to have a negative impact on hard-copy sales. • There was a relatively high concentration of use. Thus, in the case of Management Concepts and Practices the top 10 (of 127) universities accounted for 36% of its use. • A high proportion of e-textbook use came from the newer universities (and this was true for other subjects too). • Business students were the least likely to have bought their own copy of a textbook or to have obtained one from the open web. • Business e-book users tended to search off campus and were more likely to access the books via Virtual Learning Environments. • Multiple routes to e-books confused students and the library catalogue/OPAC was the main means of accessing e-textbooks. • E-textbooks were mainly used for obtaining snippets of information and fact finding. Power browsing of multiple e-textbooks was characteristic, a function of massive choice. There appeared to be very little extended reading of e-books. Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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• The most important reason for using e-books was convenience – of transporting and accessing them. • The main problems encountered were: a) lack of e-book titles; b) access and navigation; c) reading electronic text; and d) poor promotion. • E-textbook searching in business is less tied to the rhythms of the teaching year than other subjects and this could be because students have more project work or because of the large postgraduate numbers in the field. • Business e-book users tend to search off campus (the fact that many are part-time provides part of the explanation). • Business students clearly substituted print in favour of electronic in the library context and still bought the books.
Acknowledgements The work was wholly undertaken with the funding of JISC Collections and we would like to thank JISC and also our other colleagues on this project, Chris Armstrong and Ray Lonsdale.
Notes 1 The entry survey did not ask this question. 2 The entry survey did not ask this question.
References [1] JISC, National e-Books Observatory Project: Key Findings and Recommendations (2009). Available at: www.jiscebooksproject.org/reports (accessed 5 January 2010). [2] D. Nicholas, P. Huntington, I. Rowlands, T. Dobrowolski and H.R. Jamali, SuperBook: an action research project. Online Information 2007 Proceedings (2007), 50–57 [3] C.A. Hughes and N.L. Buchanan, Use of Electronic monographs in the humanities and social sciences, Library Hi Tech 19(4) (2001) 368–375. [4] T.P. Bailey, Electronic book usage at a Master’s level I university: a longitudinal study, Journal of Academic Librarianship 32(1) (2006) 52–59. [5] M. Borchert, A. Hunter, D. Macdonald and C. Tittel, A Study on Student and Staff Awareness, Acceptance and Usage of E-books at two Queensland Universities (2009). Available at: http://eprints.usq.edu.au/4876/ (accessed 2 April 2009). [6] D. Dillon, E-books: The University of Texas experience, Part 1, Library Hi-Tech 19(2) (2001) 113–124. [7] D. Dillon, E-books: The University of Texas experience, Part 2, Library Hi-Tech 19(4) (2001) 350–362. [8] M. Langston, The California State University e-book pilot project: implications for cooperative collection development, Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services 27(1) (2003) 19–32. [9] P. Hernon, R. Hopper, M.R. Leach, L.L. Saunders and J. Zhang, E-book use by students: undergraduates in economics, literature, and nursing, Journal of Academic Librarianship 33(1) (2007) 3–13. [10] B. Hunter and N. Sprague, Assessing e-books: taking a closer look at e-book statistics, Library Collections, Acquisitions and Technical Services 32(3–4) (2009) 150–157. [11] L. Nelson and F. O’Neil, Electronic monographs in the academic library: an implementation story, LASIE 32(2/3) (2001) 13–20. [12] D. Nicholas, P. Huntington, T. Dobrowolski, I. Rowlands, H.R. Jamali. and P. Polydoratou, Revisiting ‘obsolescence’ and journal article ‘decay’ through usage data: an analysis of digital journal use by year of publication, Information Processing and Management 41(6) (2005) 1441–1461. [13] D. Nicholas, D. Clark, I. Rowlands and H.R. Jamali, Online use and information seeking behaviour: institutional and subject comparisons of UK researchers, Journal of Information Science 35(6) (2009) 660–676. Journal of Information Science, 36 (2) 2010, pp. 263–280 © CILIP, DOI: 10.1177/0165551510363660
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[14] D. Nicholas and I. Rowlands (eds), Digital Consumers: Re-shaping the Information Professions (Facet, London, 2008). [15] D. Nicholas, I. Rowlands and T. Nicholas, Scholarly e-book users: everything you ever wanted to know about them. Online Information Conference Proceedings (2009). [16] A. Savikas, Does digital cannibalize print? Not yet. O’Reilly Media Tools of Change for Publishing website (2009). Available online at: http://toc.oreilly.com/2009/08/does-digital-cannibalize-print-not-likely.html (accessed 6 October 2009). [17] C. Wain (2009), E-books, members, networks and missions. In: Royal Chemical Society Presentation to ALPSP International Conference 2008. Available online at www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article. asp?aid=2437 (accessed 6 October 2009). [18] D. Wiley, Giving away academic books online may actually help print sales, The Chronicle of Higher Education (6 October 2009). Available online at: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/David-Wiley-GivingAway/7278/ (accessed 6 October 2009).
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