Sunday 12 July 2009

E-books in Scandinavia - 3

In its blog, Publit, the Swedish print-on-demand publisher we mentioned in an earlier post, refers to an interesting survey of e-book use among unversity students that was carried out recently by the UK's JISC (Join Information Systems Committee). Although the findings relate to e-books in the academic world, they may have some relevance to the field of electronic publishing in general. Print sales, the survey suggests,
indicated that making course text e-books freely available through the library is not a threat to print sales revenue. Many of the print versions of the e-books made available through the Observatory project actually increased their sales against what was expected. So just as the librarians say, students are using e-books in addition to the print they have bought or borrowed; they co-exist.

3 comments:

John Holten said...

Hi David et al,

I was just wondering how it is I can contact the bloggers of Nordic Voices regarding a question I have? Is there an email that I could email? I have quite a bit of a question you see, with details about a project I'm currently involved in and would be too long for blog comment!

Just message me back at my page or at holtenjohn (at) gmail . com

Thanks and great blog!

jh

Eric Dickens said...

When reading the articles that David referred us to, I came across one bit of jargon I didn't understand: "e-book platform". What exactly is one of those? I found, when Googling, that people tended to use the expression rather than define it.

David McDuff said...

John, if you click on my name in the "Contributors" sidebar, you'll see an email address that you can write to.

Eric, I think an e-book "platform" is just another name for an e-book service, i.e. a service that supplies e-books for download.