Category: E-Books

"The Majority of Authors Agree That All Future Scholarly Books Should Be OA": The Future of Open Access Books: Findings from a Global Survey of Academic Book Authors

Springer Nature has released The Future of Open Access Books: Findings from a Global Survey of Academic Book Authors .

Here's an excerpt:

A global Springer Nature survey of more than 2,500 academic book authors provides in-depth insights into attitudes towards open access.

The survey looks at researchers' motivations for publishing a book, and analyses the parameters and key drivers which influence academics to publish OA or not. The white paper also identifies the major obstacles to OA publication which book authors still face: from a lack of awareness of OA publishing options and low funding, to concerns about how OA books are perceived.

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UK Open Textbooks Report 2019

The UK Open Textbook Project has released the UK Open Textbooks Report 2019.

Here's an excerpt:

The UK Open Textbooks project was conducted in several stages over the period of March 2017 to May 2019. The project tested two highly successful approaches to increasing engagement with, and use of, open textbooks. . . .

In the report we conclude that the awareness of OER and open textbooks is typically very low in the UK HE sector. However, awareness of open access publications is high, supported by the Finch Report and REF policy on open access deposition. Although existing knowledge of open textbooks was low, once educators were made aware of them, they expressed significant interest in their adoption. This provides an existing conceptual model and set of practices on which to build.

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"What Future for Digital Scholarly Editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter"

Elena Pierazzo has published "What Future for Digital Scholarly Editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter" in the International Journal of Digital Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

Digital scholarly editions are expensive to make and to maintain. As such, they prove unattainable for less established scholars like early careers and PhD students, or indeed anyone without access to significant funding. One solution could be to create tools and platforms able to provide a publishing framework for digital scholarly editions that requires neither a high-tech skillset nor big investment.

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"The Cornwall a-book: An Augmented Travel Guide Using Next Generation Paper"

David M. Frohlich et al. have published "The Cornwall a-book: An Augmented Travel Guide Using Next Generation Paper" in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

Electronic publishing usually presents readers with book or e-book options for reading on paper or screen. In this paper, we introduce a third method of reading on paper-and-screen through the use of an augmented book ('a-book') with printed hotlinks than can be viewed on a nearby smartphone or other device. Two experimental versions of an augmented guide to Cornwall are shown using either optically recognised pages or embedded electronics making the book sensitive to light and touch. We refer to these as second generation (2G) and third generation (3G) paper respectively. A common architectural framework, authoring workflow and interaction model is used for both technologies, enabling the creation of two future generations of augmented books with interactive features and content. In the travel domain we use these features creatively to illustrate the printed book with local multimedia and updatable web media, to point to the printed pages from the digital content, and to record personal and web media into the book.

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"Format Shift: Information Behavior and User Experience in the Academic E-book Environment"

Daniel G. Tracy has published "Format Shift: Information Behavior and User Experience in the Academic E-book Environment" in Reference & User Services Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

This article seeks to understand information behavior in the context of the academic e-book user experience, shaped by a disparate set of vendor platforms licensed by libraries. These platforms vary in design and affordances, yet studies of e-book use in an academic context often treat e-books as a unified phenomenon in opposition to print books. Based on participant diaries tracking e-book information behavior and follow-up interviews and focus groups on troubleshooting and format shifting behaviors, this study seeks to provide a deep qualitative look at decisions that academic users make about formats when encountering e-books.

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The State of Digital Publishing in Canada 2017

BookNet Canada has released The State of Digital Publishing in Canada 2017.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

When it comes to unit sales of books in Canada, according to our quarterly consumer surveying, 18.6% of purchases in 2017 were ebooks. This is a slight increase from 2016, when ebook sales made up 16.9% of purchases. At the same time, the number of publishers producing ebooks also increased: 94% of publishers reported that they are currently producing ebooks, up 3% from 2016 (91%).

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Open Access and Monographs: Where Are We Now?

The British Academy has released Open Access and Monographs: Where Are We Now?.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Academy argues that any future model for open access monograph publication needs to be properly funded with additional money. And a generous list of exceptions will need to be defined—for example 'crossover' books which merit submission to the REF but which also make an important contribution to the UK’s 'trade' publishing industry.

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"The Academic Book and Its Digital Dilemmas"

Paul Spence, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King's College London, has published "The Academic Book and Its Digital Dilemmas" in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.

Here's an excerpt:

Focusing in particular on the arts and humanities, this article asks how, and under what conditions, the digitally mediated long-form academic publication might hold a viable future. It examines digital disruption and innovation within humanities publishing, contrasts different models and outlines some of the key challenges facing scholarly publishing in the humanities. This article examines how non-traditional entities, such as digital humanities research projects, have performed digital publishing roles and reviews possible implications for scholarly book publishing's relationship to the wider research process. It concludes by looking at how digital or hybrid long-form publications might become more firmly established within the scholarly publishing landscape.

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"Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bil"

SPARC has released "Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bil."

Here's an excerpt:

In a landmark victory for the Open Education movement, the U.S. Congress has included funding for a $5 million open textbook grant program in the Fiscal Year 2018 omnibus appropriations bill unveiled today. This marks the first major investment by Congress explicitly in open educational resources (OER) as a solution to the high cost of college textbooks, and underscores that course materials are a significant factor in making higher education affordable. The FY18 omnibus is expected to proceed swiftly to votes in the House and Senate and get signed into law this week.

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