The Library recently promoted a survey on e-books that many of you took part in. This survey was run at universities across the UK and over 23,000 staff and students participated. This was the second survey run as part of the JISC national e-books observatory project http://www.jiscebooksproject.org/ , the first was in January 2008. The surveys were exploring current awareness, perceptions and attitudes towards e-books and looking to see if these changed between 2008 and 2009.
Together, these surveys received over 48,000 responses - the world's biggest e-book survey ever undertaken! We would like to thank you for participating in the surveys. A student at Royal Holloway University of London won the £200 Amazon voucher prize.
Some headline findings from the surveys:
• Use of e-books for study increased for students from 61.4% in 2008 to 64.4% in 2009 but the highest increase was use by staff, which increased from 58.9% to 64.9%.
• Surprisingly, over 63% of respondents said that they read the content of e-books from a screen with only around 6% printing pages out, however, the average time spent reading was only between 11 and 20 minutes.
• Over 54% of respondents said that they dip in and out of e-book chapters with only around 8% reading a whole chapter.
• Encouragingly, the percentage of teaching staff recommending e-books to students and placing direct links to them via the virtual learning environment or online reading lists increased between 2008 and 2009.
• There was no discernable difference between the use of e-books by age groups, although it does appear that men prefer e-books to women.
• Most staff and students get access to their e-books via the university library and dependency on this access had increased by 2009.
• Satisfaction with the availability of print textbooks through the library increased from 2008 to 2009 and this may be due to the availability of more e-books taking the pressure of the print copies.
• The results of the surveys will be used to develop the e-books market to help make sure that staff and students can get access to the books they need either in print or electronic format.
For further information on e-books in the Library please see Library e-books page http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/e-resources/ebooks.htm
For further information on the JISC national e-books observatory project please see www.jiscebooksproject.org
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