What do faculty and students really think about e-books?

This article reports on a large-scale survey of nearly two thousand faculty and students at one institution, University College London, and profiles their use and perceptions of ebooks. The context for the study is an action research project, CIBER’s SuperBook, that will further investigate the issues raised in this initial benchmarking survey using deep log analysis and qualitative methods. The survey findings point to various ways in which user uptake and acceptance of e-books may be encouraged. Book discovery behaviour, a key issue for publishers and librarians in both print and electronic environments, emerges as a critical focus for service delivery and enhancement. Context for the research Until very recently, research into how digital resources are used within the academy has focused primarily on journals. Considerable steps have been made by CIBER in understanding journal user behaviour, through groundbreaking studies of Emerald, Blackwell Synergy, OhioLINK, and Oxford Open journal platforms. These studies led on the analysis of the digital “fingerprints” left by the users of electronic journals. However, the virtual scholar uses a much wider range of digitally delivered content to achieve their research, teaching and learning goals. As a first step towards a more rounded picture of how digital resources are used, we are now subjecting e-books, the new kid on the block, to the same robust approach that we have previously reserved for journals. There is much talk about the market potential for e-books, especially in a higher education context, but few robust user studies. This is worrying because e-books have, arguably, greater potential to change the information landscape than journals. We are addressing this issue through SuperBook, an action research study, funded by Wiley, Emerald and CIBER, which involves ‘dropping’ about three thousand carefully selected e-texts into the UCL community and then