E-Books – DigitalKoans

"How Librarians are Advancing Open Book Publishing at the Lever Press"

At an October 2010 meeting of the Oberlin Group, a consortium of over 80 liberal arts college libraries in the United States, one of us (BG) made an audacious proposal: that the Oberlin Group establish an open access press, devoted to the production of peer-reviewed books, rigorously edited and distributed in electronic form without fees. . . .

Fourteen years later, the Lever Press is thriving as the publisher of digital-first diamond open-access monographs on topics of interest to the liberal arts. Lever presents a unique model for how libraries, especially those from smaller institutions, can help transform the open-access landscape.

https://tinyurl.com/9hwpa2bp

"Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft"

Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. The dataset was created by Harvard’s newly formed Institutional Data Initiative with funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI. It contains books scanned as part of the Google Books project that are no longer protected by copyright.

https://tinyurl.com/ymen65js

"The Open Monograph Distribution and Acquisitions Gap: A Look at TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) Titles"

The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) network of universities, and the open access (OA) monographs that have been funded and published through this program, provide a unique opportunity to study the work done by university presses and academic libraries to distribute and acquire this content. TOME is a program that supports university presses’ publication of OA monographs through locally funded subventions. Though the works have been published by universities, and the subvention programs that make them OA have largely involved the funding institution libraries in the process, the resulting OA works are not easily discoverable or accessible through library systems. Because it is so highly distributed across many academic institutions, the TOME collection of OA monograph titles offers the opportunity for libraries and publishers to more closely examine the process of creating OA content and provides the chance to study how we collectively make these works discoverable and accessible to our communities and more broadly in the world as well. The analysis presented in this paper offers insights into developing and refining procedures and management strategies at libraries participating in TOME. These recommendations provide insights into discovery of and access to OA monographs in general.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15492

"Internet Archive Copyright Case Ends without Supreme Court Review "

After more than four years of litigation, a closely watched copyright case over the Internet Archive’s scanning and lending of library books is finally over after Internet Archive officials decided against exercising their last option, an appeal to the Supreme Court. The deadline to file an appeal was December 3.

https://tinyurl.com/6j4ukfmp

"Exploring First-Generation Student Experiences with OER Textbooks"

The other aspect of textbooks that students found very important, at 31 percent (64) or extremely important, at 38 percent (78) was cost. Cost was particularly important for first-generation students. Fifty-nine percent (36) of first-generation students considered cost to be an extremely important factor, compared to twenty-nine percent (42) of continuing-generation students. Strikingly, not a single first-generation student considered cost to be unimportant. . . .

Although the OER sections of ENGL 104 were tagged in the University’s course marking system, a mere 2.9 percent of students (four) reported being aware that their course was an OER course when they registered. By contrast, 96% percent (131 students) reported learning that the textbook was available at no cost when classes were already starting (i.e., on the first day or when they received their syllabus). This delay in learning about textbook costs means that students who could most benefit from a no-cost textbook were unable to strategically select an OER section. . . .

Another important finding is that the primary method by which students accessed their OER textbook, electronic only access, does not align with the access method students stated they preferred. Respondents indicated that they wanted textbooks that they could highlight and make notes in; they wanted a textbook that they could hold in their hands and that didn’t strain their eyes. At the same time, respondents wanted textbooks that they could access from anywhere and that had searchable text. Finally, respondents strongly indicated a desire for a textbook that is not unwieldy and heavy to lug across campus. Print with an electronic copy, the format most popular with students, meets all of these criteria.

https://tinyurl.com/mtnbd963

"Open Book Futures InfoHub Scoping Report"

One of the deliverables of Copim’s Open Book Futures project is to establish a ‘knowledge base’ (or equivalent) to provide comprehensive resources on alternative funding models and modes of publishing, acquiring and archiving open access books, alongside new training and guidance on archiving and preservation best practice. The deliverable states that we will (a) develop resources for stakeholders, (b) consolidate existing resources, (c) promote business models best practice, and (d) showcase project work on metadata, experimental publishing and archiving. By providing a comprehensive tool suite of resources we will accelerate outreach to libraries, publishers, academics and the wider public, to advocate for, advise on and encourage open access publishing and initiatives.

This scoping report is the first step in this process. Drawing on the myriad of resources we know exist (produced within and outside the OBF project), it presents an overview of existing assets and guidance for OA book publishing, a gap analysis, and our initial recommendations for the OBF working group to consider, all of which will be used to scope the direction and final format of the ‘knowledge base’.

https://tinyurl.com/2xv52u6b

"Research Assessment Systems and the Effects of Publication Language: Manifestations in the Directory of Open Access Books"

Research assessment is a major driver of research behavior. The current emphasis on journal citations in a limited number of journals with an English focus has multiple effects. The need to publish in English even when it is not the local language affects the type of research undertaken and further consolidates the Global North-centric view or scientific approach. The bibliometric databases on which assessments of universities and journals are based are owned by two large corporate organizations, and this concentration of the market has in turn concentrated the research environment. Open infrastructure offers an alternative option for the research endeavor. The OAPEN online open access library and the Directory of Open Access Books form part of this infrastructure and we consider the pattern of languages present in the directories over time.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.4847

"CDL Decision Round Two: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Why There is Still Hope OR The Reports of CDL’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated"

Let me be unequivocal: libraries do not need a license to loan books, whether physical or digital. Lending legally acquired books is not illegal. Libraries are entitled to share these works, with no obligation to enter into licensing agreements or contracts beforehand. Furthermore, libraries—and their patrons—are legally permitted to make various uses of these works, including interlibrary loan, reserves, preservation, and fair use, all without needing permission from rightsholders.

This is because various exceptions in the law, including Section 108 for Libraries and Archives, ad Section 109 known as the first sale doctrine. We know that Section 109 preserves the balance between rightsholders and libraries. When a library purchases a book, it has the right to loan that work freely, without requiring additional permissions or payments to the copyright holder. A digitized version of a legally acquired book simply replaces the physical copy, not an unpurchased one in the marketplace. Any “market harm” is already factored into the initial sale, for which both the authors and publishers have been compensated.

https://tinyurl.com/3exh96bu

"eBooks, Interlibrary Loan and an Uncertain Future"

Important advancements are underway, but ILL for ebooks is hampered by restrictive licensing models, resource sharing systems, and current practices. This study provides an environmental scan of the current acquisitions and ILL practices of academic libraries. This paper guides academic libraries through these conversations so that they can support the borrowing and lending of ebooks into the future.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2024.2391735

"Internet Archive Forced to Remove 500,000 Books after Publishers’ Court Win"

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles. . . .

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it. . . ./p>

Freeland [Chris Freeland, IA’s director of library service] told Ars it could take months or even more than a year before a decision is reached in the case.

While IA fights to end the injunction, its other library services continue growing, IA has said. IA "may still digitize books for preservation purposes" and "provide access to our digital collections" through interlibrary loan and other means. IA can also continue lending out-of-print and public domain books.

https://tinyurl.com/47aws7z7

"More Readers in More Places: The Benefits of Open Access for Scholarly Books"

Open access to scholarly contents has grown substantially in recent years. This includes the number of books published open access online. However, there is limited study on how usage patterns (via downloads, citations and web visibility) of these books may differ from their closed counterparts. Such information is not only important for book publishers, but also for researchers in disciplines where books are the norm. This article reports on findings from comparing samples of books published by Springer Nature to shed light on differences in usage patterns across open access and closed books. The study includes a selection of 281 open access books and a sample of 3,653 closed books (drawn from 21,059 closed books using stratified random sampling). The books are stratified by combinations of book type, discipline and year of publication to enable likewise comparisons within each stratum and to maximize statistical power of the sample. The results show higher geographic diversity of usage, higher numbers of downloads and more citations for open access books across all strata. Importantly, open access books have increased access and usage for traditionally underserved populations.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.558

"MIT Press releases Direct to Open (D2O) Impact Report"

The MIT Press announces the release of a report on its Direct to Open (D2O) program detailing the impact that it has had in its first three years. Launched in 2021, D2O is a sustainable framework for open access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single eBooks, to a collaborative, library-supported open access model. . . .

To date, D2O has funded 240 books: 159 in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), and 81 in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art/Design, and Mathematics (STEAM). The data show that, on average, open access HSS books in the program are used 3.75 times more and receive 21% more citations than their paywalled counterparts. Open access books in STEAM fields are used 2.67 times more and receive 15% more citations than their non-open counterparts, on average. . . .

At a time when average print runs for academic monographs are often in the low hundreds, books in the D2O program are reaching larger audiences online than ever before—averaging 3,061 downloads per title and bringing important scholarship to international audiences.

https://tinyurl.com/4cwet48f

Open Access Projects in Europe: From a General Perspective to Monographs and Ebooks

The development of policies in favour of open science and the transformation of publication channels for academic literature and research produced with public funding by researchers and authors in higher education, combined with technological and financial developments in open access models for scholarly publication and the interest shown by funders for a long time in journals and articles and more recently in monographs and textbooks, continue to reshape the face of academic publication.

Cécile Swiatek Cassafieres, a member of the Executive Board of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBEReurope.org), will provide a general overview of the main European trends, initiatives and projects in this area, focusing on the diamond model and its current prospects, before addressing the case of ‘books’ in open access, from the angle of monographs on the one hand, and textbooks on the other. A presentation of LIBER’s own initiatives will illustrate the Association of European Research Libraries’ support for such developments.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11149567

"Launch of UPLOpen.com: Revolutionizing Access to Open Knowledge and Empowering Global Sustainability Goals"

In an ambitious move to democratize access to scholarly knowledge and advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the De Gruyter eBound Foundation is thrilled to unveil UPLOpen.com, a product of University Press Library Open (UPLO), an innovative website that curates high-quality, open access scholarship from the world’s leading university presses. . . .

At launch, UPLOpen.com proudly hosts more than 350 open access books from over thirty university presses, including two landmark collections: Luminos, from the University of California Press, and TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses), which concluded in 2022 but continues to release new titles. By mid-2024, the number of titles hosted on UPLOpen.com is expected to exceed 2,500, with further plans for significant growth already in motion for 2025 and beyond.

https://tinyurl.com/5ftcmx2p

"Towards a Books Data Commons for AI Training"

This white paper describes ways of building a books data commons: a responsibly designed, broadly accessible data set of digitized books to be used in training AI models. This report, written in partnership with Creative Commons and Proteus Strategies, is based on a series of workshops that brought together practitioners building AI models, legal and policy scholars, and experts working with collections of digitized books.

In the paper, we first explain why books matter for AI training and how broader access could be beneficial. We then summarize two tracks that might be considered for developing such a resource, highlighting existing projects that help foreground the potential challenges. One track relies on public domain and permissively licensed books, while the other depends on exceptions to copyright to enable training on in-copyright books. The report also presents several key design choices and next steps that could advance further development of this approach.

https://tinyurl.com/2fu47552

"[AAP] Publishers File Brief Opposing Internet Archive Appeal of Loss"

Controlled digital lending is a frontal assault on the foundational copyright principle that rightsholders exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work — a principle that has spawned the broad diversity in formats of books, movies, television and music that consumers enjoy today.

"[T]here is no resemblance between IA’s conversion of millions of print books into ebooks and the historical practice of lending print books. Nor does IA’s distribution of ebooks without paying authors and their publishers a dime conform with the modern practices of libraries, which acquire licenses to lend ebooks to their local communities and enjoy the benefits of digital distribution lawfully."

The Internet Archive ("IA") operates a mass-digitization enterprise in which it copies millions of complete, in-copyright print books and distributes the resulting bootleg ebooks from its website to anyone in the world for free. Granting summary judgment, the District Court properly held that IA’s infringement is not saved by fair use as each of the four factors weighs against IA under longstanding case law.

https://tinyurl.com/5ah5vx3x

"Supporting Open Access Monographs: Penn State University Libraries’ Participation in the TOME Initiative"

In 2017, Penn State pledged to participate in the then newly established Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Initiative. TOME was launched by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) as a five-year pilot with two main types of participants: colleges and universities and university presses. Penn State was one of the first universities to commit funds to participate in TOME, which was designed to support peer-reviewed, open access monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Each participating university committed $225,000 total for the five-year pilot, split out into $45,000 per academic year to support three grants of $15,000 per monograph. This number was established based on the recommendation from the Ithaka S+R Report "The Costs of Publishing Monographs."

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.3.66

"E-book Acceptance by First-Year Undergraduate Students: A Longitudinal Examination and Implications for Library Researchers"

The frequency of electronic book usage by students, according to the research described here, appears fairly positive. On a six-level scale, ranging from 1 (I don’t use it at all) to 6 (I use it several times a week), the average score was 3.27, and the most frequent response, was "Use several times a month" (n = 84, 28 %). This suggests that, on average, students tend to use e-books approximately once or twice a month.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102847

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open Reaches Annual Funding Goal, Opens Access to Full List of 2024 Monographs"

Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.

http://tinyurl.com/4phkat8x

"UKRI [UK Research and Innovation] Monograph Open Access Policy Coming Soon: Here’s What You Need to Know"

The core requirements are:

The final Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher’s website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication

The OA version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with an Open Government Licence (OGL) also permitted.

Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the OA version where possible (third-party materials DO NOT require a CC licence)….

The UKRI allocates £8 billion of taxpayers’ money annually to support research and innovation.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxrna84

"Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project"

We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the market for physical books. We find that digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions and provide evidence for the discovery channel. Moreover, digitization allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales.

https://tinyurl.com/2pbuzty2

"Measured in a Context: Making Sense of Open Access Book Data"

Open access (OA) book platforms, such as JSTOR, OAPEN Library or Google Books, have been available for over a decade. Each platform shows usage data, but this results in confusion about how well an individual book is performing overall. Even within one platform, there are considerable usage differences between subjects and languages. Some context is therefore necessary to make sense of OA books usage data. A possible solution is a new metric — the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and, to keep the level of complexity as low as possible, the score is based on a simple metric. As a proof of the concept, the usage of over 18,000 open access books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has been analysed, to determine whether each individual title has performed as well as can be expected compared to similar titles.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627

"An Open Book: Launching a Library-Based Open Access Books Hosting Service"

Edinburgh University Library launched a journal hosting service in 2009, initially to support two journals. The service has since grown into a portfolio of 19 journals and a handful of conference proceedings. The purpose of this case study is to review the 2021 launch of our book hosting service and our service rebrand to Edinburgh Diamond, looking at the reasons for launching, the timeline and challenges, and offering recommendations for those wishing to launch their own service.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13745

Paywall: "Digital Ownership: The Case of E-books"

This paper presents the results of an empirical research study that used an online survey to examine e-book consumers’ perspectives on digital ownership and digital rights. The study revealed that while most participants value and desire ownership rights, certain conventional ownership rights, such as reselling, gifting, and lending, are deemed less significant and can be relinquished by consumers due to cost-related factors. Furthermore, contrary to prevailing assumptions, the study found no discernible generational gap concerning people’s perceptions of digital ownership rights.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.807

"Springer Nature and Authors Successfully Use Generative AI to Publish Academic Book"

As part of an innovative experiment, Springer Nature has become the first publisher to create a whole new academic book by empowering authors to use GPT as part of the integrated workflow. Developed during a —Hack Day— in the Spring which brought together authors, editors and experts from across Springer Nature, the German-language book Einsatzmöglichkeiten von GPT in Finance, Compliance und Audit (Applications of GPT in finance, compliance and audit) has now been published. It took less than five months from inception to publication — about half the time normally taken. . . .

The process was as follows:

Working simultaneously on six screens, the team defined commands which GPT then executed chapter by chapter to create the first version of the manuscript

At each stage of the process, the content generated by the Large Language Model (LLM) was reviewed by the authors, who then asked the machine to adapt the text

This "prompt ping pong" ensured that the knowledge expertise of the authors renowned in their field was combined with the language expertise of the LLM

After the Hack Day, the authors and Springer Nature’s editorial team further checked, corrected and supplemented the text

The team then linked the relevant data sources to ensure proper attribution

https://tinyurl.com/4x7nvvks