Your experience of e-books

[binkie]

Thanks, Nitrus, for letting me canvas for blatantly work-related information

I am part of the Knowledge and Thought Leadership team in an international commercial consultancy practice. I am currently looking at renegotiating the licenses for a range of online resources, and I'm hoping SF members can help me build up a picture of experience of, and attitudes towards, e-books. I am interested in your experience of using e-books, whether you buy them, borrow them from a library, download them from an online environment, or access them in the course of your work or study.

I do have a short list of questions for you to consider, but even if none of these seem relevant to your experience of e-books, I am still interested in hearing from you. The questions are not designed to test you or catch you out. If you don't have an answer to one, or any, of the questions, that's fine. Let me know your opinion, or your experience, outside of the questions anyway.

1. Do you prefer to access e-books as static documents (eg. PDF or EPUB), or as manipulable content (eg. Apple's Enhanced Editions)?

2. Do you print e-books, or parts of e-books, where possible?

3. What is your experience of digital rights management (DRM)? This might include restrictions relating to your e-book, such as a prohibition on printing or saving the file; a time limit on the amount of time before the file expires or is deleted from your hard drive or online account; or restrictions on the number of times you can access the e-book within a specific timeframe.

4. Have you made use of software to allow you to overcome DRM? (This is not a trick question: free and legal downloads are available to help you do just this)

If you have experience of obtaining e-books via any system supported by OverDrive, I would be very interested to know how you feel about the service. [If you obtain e-books from a public or academic library (including a school library) in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, you are almost certainly doing so using a system provided by OverDrive.]

I look forward to hearing your views and experiences. Virtual confectionary (and actual gratitude) to everyone who responds Please feel free to PM me if you would rather not have your response show up on a public forum.

[Silktie]

Here in SA we are severely limited as to which e-book sites we have access to due to copyright issues. I'll give you my experiences anyway.

1. Static docs

2. No, I never print them. If I really enjoy a book, I'll actually go out and buy the paperback to keep if possible.

3. Most of these have not been a problem for me to date. However, I haven't loaned e-books yet, only bought them. The sites we have access to don't have these restrictions if you buy the book.

4. Have not needed to use software to overcome DRM restrictions. However, I have used software to get around geographical restriction issues on occasion.

I have not used any system supported by OverDrive.

In general, I think e-books are a fantastic concept, and I hope that in time access to e-books will improve for geographical locations outside the US and Europe. I still love to have an actual book in my hands though, and will continue to buy those I read in e-book form that are really good and I know I will want to read again.

[binkie]

Silktie, thank you for responding so quickly to what must seem like a very odd request for information

This point interests me:

(07-03-2011 06:34 AM)Silktie Wrote:  I still love to have an actual book in my hands though, and will continue to buy those I read in e-book form that are really good and I know I will want to read again.

The corporate library in which I work (which is becoming more corporate by the day!) has, in recent times, conducted a number of surveys of its user constituency. Almost inevitably, one of the overriding themes among respondents is that of a wish for more, and improved, access to technical and professional information online. In response to this, we now offer a variety of journal subscriptions as digital editions. We are, at the same time, receiving an increasing number of requests for hard copies of the same titles. People like to turn a page, it seems, even where they have suggested they would rather not. Furthermore, as you indicate, the preference is for the object itself, rather than for a representative iteration thereof: our users want the journal, they don't want the pages they can print from the digital edition.

[picard1109]

Hi Binkie

1. only had experience of static docs via .pdf and Kindle

2. I like to print off parts of academic e-books but it's often not possible due to DRM.

3. E-books from my university are subject to DRM, usually. It means I can only access the book for 7 days, and can't print or copy any part of it. For long term academic study, this is a real nuisance and I have sometime had to resort to taking screen shots of pages and pasting into Word documents!

4. I'd love to know what this free software is so I can download it!

[binkie]

picard1109, thanks for sharing your experiences of e-books.


The academic environment is one of the most frustrating for DRM. This is because academic consortia represent massive income streams for e-book vendors, and they exert the most vice-like controls they can to ensure maintenance of this income. The exception is Springer, which extends no DRM to users. If you are studying a science or other technical subject (construction, medicine, engineering, etc.), your university should have a license agreement with Springer. Of course, this doesn't help you at all if you are studying a humanities or arts subject


For more information about free DRM software (where to find it, how to use it, and what other options are available to you), go here: http://www.fsf.org/

[picard1109]

Thanks for the link, Binkie.

Are you also investigating things like agency pricing of e-books by publishers, which can often make the e-book more expensive than the hard copy?

[binkie]

(07-03-2011 07:46 PM)picard1109 Wrote:  Are you also investigating things like agency pricing of e-books by publishers, which can often make the e-book more expensive than the hard copy?

Oh, you bet!

I have a terrifyingly lengthy list of sticking points and demands. Principal among them (once I get past all the value-for-money requirements) is the matter of artificial scarcity, which dictates that we must buy more than one copy of a document if we want to be able to offer clean access to it. The insistence of e-book vendors that their product should be treated for content management purposes as though it is a tangible object is plainly ridiculous. As is the requirement that we buy a number of uses, then buy some more, as though we might wear out the file

HarperCollins recently instituted a requirement that all its e-books be replaced after 26 downloads, as this (they concluded for no defensible reason that any sane person can discern) is the number of times a book can be loaned before it must be replaced. That's an interesting parallel world they inhabit at HarperCollins

Pricing structures and issues of concurrent access are my life for the next six months

[picard1109]

It IS absolutely outrageous the way some publishers are behaving - and cutting their greedy noses off to spite their faces. I have a Kindle and won't pay more than £5 for any book. I have seen several books I'd like to read being priced out of range by greedy publishers, and it's the case even for back catalogue books.

So, I buy collections of books on disk via Ebay and just convert the .pdf files using Calibre. Some of the formatting can be dodgy but most books are fine.

[binkie]

Unfortunately, we are prevented by various standards of professional practice and internal quality management protocols, from using, or recommending, anything like Calibre in the context of the workplace. The library is subject to regular BSI audits, and the company I work for is a listed concern, so we really can't make use of clever options like this

Admittedly, this doesn't stop us from ignoring copyright controls in other ways Corporate libraries are the servants of the commercial imperative of fee-earning directors, so we do sometimes look away when we see dodgy practices on the file share server. As long as people aren't stupid enough to leave copyright texts on their hard drives, we pretty much pretend we know nothing about what we euphemistically term "reference documents".

[cateau1]

1. Depends very much on the book. If it's a straight novel (ie text only) then ePub is all I need. I hate pdf versions though if they don't fit to my iPad screen size and I constantly have to move the page around or resize it because the text doesn't flow like an ePub book. If it's a non fiction book or a children's book, an enhanced interactive app can take the reading experience to a whole new level by providing fun interactivity, great searchability, video footage, ability to add my own content to, say, a database, use my GPS location to customise information relevant to me, etc. etc.
2. I've never printed anything from an ebook or app, though I might from a website or blog - though I'm more likely to cut and paste, or file it.
3. I know DRM is a big issue, but it's not impacted on me yet, though I know it's a real issue for authors who are struggling to make a living out of being published.
4. No, because of the above.

I LOVE pbooks and how they feel and smell, and how you can keep them - or give them as gifts. But I am also enjoying the digital world's portability and how it lets me go beyond the printed page. I'm sure there's room for both. I love the response from little kids too when you have an enhanced book for them that lets them record their own voice as they read, or touch the illustrations to make 'things' happen. I love, too, that if they don't know how to say a word, they can touch the word and it will be pronounced for them. I know of one child whose daddy is serving with the army overseas and dad was able to record his voice reading the story apps when he was at home last, so his son now listens to daddy reading him a bedtime story at night (brought tears to my eyes!)