E-book readers and scholarship: a research report

Gielen, N. (2010) Handheld E-Book Readers and Scholarship: Report and Reader Survey New York: ACLS Humanities E-book

Humanities E-Book is a digital collection of nearly 2,800 full-text titles offered by the ACLS in collaboration with twenty learned societies, nearly 100 contributing publishers, and librarians at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. The result is an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in the Humanities, recommended and reviewed by scholars and featuring unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable MARC records. HEB is available 24/7 on- and off-campus through standard web browsers.

This report describes a conversion experiment and subsequent reader survey conducted by ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) in late 2009 and early 2010 to assess the viability of using scholarly monographs with handheld e-readers (Sony Reader, Kindle 2 and Apple iPhone  – Stanza).

This is a careful study that looks not only at different methods of converting online scholarly work into different e-book formats, and the costs of doing so, but also the ease of use for scholarly purposes, based on responses from 142 survey participants. Some key findings:

• navigation and annotation difficulties were found in converting OCR and XML files to both MOBI and ePub formats
• 88% of our 142 survey participants expressed overall satisfaction with the appearance and functionality of the three remaining handheld samples, although roughly half reported some level of frustration with the search function using either format, and only 26% felt they would have an easy time citing and referencing these editions. Satisfaction with other interactive features, such as adding notes, bookmarking and highlighting, was noticeably higher.
• 75% of participants were interested in potentially downloading additional similar titles for free or if priced below $10
• if titles were sold at $10, production costs would be offset at twenty-four downloads (note: these are scholarly works already in an online format)
• HEB’s initial findings in this study indicate that titles formatted for existing handheld devices are not yet adequate for scholarly use in terms of replicating either the benefits of online collections—cross-searchability, archiving, multifarious interactive components—nor certain aspects of print editions that users reported missing, such as being able to mark up and rapidly skim text.