Give me an 'E'

The annual Frankfurt book fair is where everyone in the world of publishing gets a chance to catch up on the newest developments. Since the last fair, Amazon has launched its Kindle e-book reader in the US, and Sony has started selling its e-book reader in the UK, so all eyes in Frankfurt will be on the 361 exhibitors including e-books in their displays.

In the academic sector, the pace of change has been faster than almost anywhere else. More than 90% of scholarly journals are now published electronically, a development that has revolutionised access.

According to Bob Campbell, senior publisher at Wiley-Blackwell, in the early 1990s a hard-copy journal would be bought by about 500 libraries. Now, as a result of changed pricing models, in which publishers offer bulk deals, or libraries join consortia to share the cost, the same journal (in electronic format) will go to about 7,000 libraries. He adds that the decision by many publishers to digitise back issues has resulted in large numbers of downloads and citations for articles that were previously gathering dust.

Enrichment
But in this increasingly competitive environment, a wider readership is not enough. Michael Jubb, director of the Research Information Network, argues that publishers need to add value to their digital offerings by providing extra functionality, such as “alerting them to new materials that may be of interest to them, providing linking services to put together all the relevant material, and so providing platforms which give to the reader a single point of entry into a much enriched set of materials”.

The growth of the e-books market has been much slower than the e-journals market, and e-book sales still make up only a small fraction of total sales. One of the problems is finding a model that works. Some publishers are nervous about losing revenue from print editions, and many have concerns about piracy. Hannah Perrett, director of digital partnership sales at Cambridge University Press, says it is easier to copy an e-book than a printed book.

But the demand is there. Libraries can save large amounts of shelf space by buying an e-book rather than a printed edition, particularly with popular textbooks, where 20 or 30 copies might be needed.

Publishers are experimenting with business models. Taylor & Francis allows users to “rent” access to an e-book for a period of between a day and six months. Oxford Scholarship Online gives institutions subscription access to a fully searchable collection of 2,000 OUP monographs. And Bloomsbury has just launched a set of e-books available as free downloads.

Bloomsbury hopes it will spur print sales of the same books, says Angus Phillips, director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies and co-author of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. “The more you make the text freely available, the more sales are going to rise because people know about it,” Phillips says.

There has been speculation that the new e-book readers could drive
e-book publishing. Financial services company Citigroup has predicted sales of 380,000 Kindles this year, and 4.4 million units a year by 2010.

It is still early days, but Perrett thinks that e-book readers will have little impact on the academic sector. “Students have got access to laptops and libraries; why would they need a Sony e-book reader as well?” he asks.

Remote possibility
But Perrett does see a strong future for e-books, particularly as more and more students study remotely. “E-publishing should facilitate accessibility, and increased distance learning means people are not always in the place where their library is,” he says. “So many universities have got overseas campuses, and it’s about flexibility and customer choice.”

The other development that will continue to have a major impact on the academic publishing sector is print on demand, where publishers produce an initial print run, and then print off any further copies from the electronic file. The model is popular: bibliographic provider Bowker reported that 134,773 print-on-demand titles were sold in the US in 2007.

Phillips believes print on demand is particularly useful in a sector where sales of individual titles may be low, and books will often go out of print because of the prohibitive costs of a second print run. “You can keep these things in print whereas previously they’d been out of print,” he says. “You can be much more careful about your stocks, as you’re not going to lose money through overprinting.”

So how will the market develop? Perrett believes the distinction between journals and books will blur: “The future is not about e-books or e-journals, it’s about e-content. Increasingly, users are not differentiating between chapters or journal articles; they just want to get access to the information they want. If that means we have to break it all up into chunks and make it available in ways we haven’t thought of yet, that’s what we’ll do.”

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