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On Wednesday, Sept. 23, I attended “E-book Demonstration Day,” an ASERL-sponsored web conference in which five different e-book vendors demonstrated their products and pricing models. ASERL is considering negotiating a deal (or deals) for members to get discounts for e-books, and held this Demonstration Day so that we could become more acquainted with the market.

The five vendors who presented were EBL (with whom ZSR already does business), Elsevier, Springer, Oxford Univ. Press, and ebrary. These could be divided into two basic business models. EBL and ebrary are intermediaries, and both provide a way for libraries to purchase individual e-book titles. Elsevier, Springer, and Oxford, on the other hand, are publishers selling their own products. They do not allow one-at-a-time purchases but instead sell collections of e-books (e.g., Oxford Scholarship Online, with access to 3000+ Oxford scholarly monographs, or subject-specific collections of e-books published in 2009 by Springer or Elsevier).

The differences between all the products are numerous, each with strengths and weaknesses, but I won’t bore you with the details. I came away with the feeling that going with EBL was a good choice. The big publishers’ online platforms seemed somewhat easier to use and had some nice features (e.g. linking out to other content), but I’m not impressed with their insistence on only selling large collections.

There wasn’t much discussion among Demo participants about the different products; I think our heads were all swimming in all the details by the end of the day. ASERL intends to send out a survey to assess further interest. It will be interesting to see what direction others want to go.

-Derrik