Thread by @hudlib

Attention students! And all members of our University community. Ever wondered why we don’t always have the books you need available to read online? This thread is our attempt at explaining…

We are grateful to @UoYLibrary whose original Twitter thread did some excellent work explaining this complex area, which we will draw on heavily for our own.

https://twitter.com/UoYLibrary/status/1389508509339996166

So, ebooks! We know it is frustrating when the book you need is not available online. Print books are wonderful (love that book smell!) but what if someone else already has the copy you need? Or you can’t travel into the library to get it (for pandemic or other reasons)?

Ebooks should be great for academic library users. You can read them from your own device at home! Many people can read the same book at once! You can make notes on the book without making the librarians sad! All great – in theory…

But it isn’t always that simple. Sometimes you might see that the book you need is only in the library in print. Or there is an ebook, but you click on it and it says someone else is already using it. Why would that be??

This is because ebook licences are complicated! When the library buys an ebook, we’re buying a licence to use it. Those licences have terms, most commonly that restrict how and when they can be used.

So for example, they might say only one person is allowed to use it at once. That’s called a “single-user licence”, and it’s the reason you sometimes see a message saying the book is already in use, or that you're "in a queue".

A real example: a book on study skills which is on dozens of reading lists. Thousands of our students all need to read it, but it’s only available as a single-user licence. We have tons of print copies in the Library, but if you need to read online you’ll probably have to wait.

The other thing to know is, ebooks cost more for libraries than they do for individuals. The price you see on Kindle or other ebook retailers, or the publishers’ own websites, is the price for individual licences.

We can’t buy these. We can only buy ebooks which are licenced for universities. The price for these is MUCH higher than the price for individual licences. Here’s a few genuine examples from our library…

A book on sustainability in construction costs £40 in print. The ebook, for a single user licence, costs £460. That’s more than ten times the cost, for a book only one person at a time can read!

Another example: a book on evidence based practice in healthcare. Currently you can buy it on Kindle for £20. For us to buy a single-user licence? Go on, guess…
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£455. That’s more than 20x the cost!

Or how about this one: a book on human resource management, £45 for print. The cost of a single-user licence? £704 – 15x the cost of the print. If we want three people at once to be able to use it? That’ll be £1,400 – 30x the cost!!

Some ebooks aren’t available for sale to libraries at all! They just won’t sell them to us, no matter how nicely we ask. That’s why if you’ve seen ebooks on Amazon or other ebook retailers, that doesn’t necessarily mean the library can buy them.

Some are only for sale to us if we buy a whole package. That’s like if you picked a paperback up in a bookshop, took it to the till and were told that you had to buy every other book on the shelves as well.

Packages aren’t ideal because a) we pay for a load of books we don’t necessarily need or want, and b) books can be removed from the packages after we’ve bought them (usually without warning), and we lose access to them.

This happened recently with a book on surgical procedures, and we can’t now buy that title individually as it’s WAY out of our budget for a single book.

Another increasing problem is “e-textbook” models. This means we have to pay an annual fee for the book (rather than just paying for it once), and the cost is based on how many students will use it.

The fees for these are enormous. For example, we paid more than £1100 for a single engineering book, for one year. We couldn’t even put it on Summon as it had to be restricted to only students on a specific module!

We cancelled after that year due to low use. The print was only £45, so we could have bought more than 20 print copies – which we would own FOREVER – for the cost of a single year’s subscription to the e-textbook.

We try our hardest to make sure that everything you, as students, need to access is available to you. But we aren’t always able to, largely due to the problems outlined above.

So what can we do about this? If you’re a student: get angry. The main reason it is so difficult for us to provide the ebooks you need is that it is more profitable to the publishers if you all individually buy your own copies.

We think that’s unfair: you already pay a lot to be at University, why should you have to pay extra for books that the library could provide, if only we were able to?

The #ebookSOS campaign is doing great work around this issue. There’s lots of info on their site, and an open letter to sign. Check them out: academicebookinvestigation.org

You could also support @ScandalUni, a student-led campaign protesting about extortionate pricing of ebooks, particularly during the Covid crisis. They have a template letter you can use to write to your MP: shorturl.at/wJUW7

Academics: we need you too! When you’re putting new books on your reading lists, or recommending them to students, ask us about ebook availability! We can advise on the cost and licences available.

If you are writing a book, please ask your publishers about their ebook licencing! The #ebookSOS campaign has a guide on this: academicebookinvestigation.org/2021/05/20/can…

If you read this far through the thread, thank you for sticking with us! We hope this has gone some way to explaining some of the frustrations you may have encountered when trying to find ebooks for your studies.