E-BOOKS

E-Books

E-Books

FINDINGS

Current use of e-books

An obvious benchmark question to start with is the extent to which members of the University of Griffith community had, at the time the survey was administered, experience of using e-books (Figure in Appendix), whether supplied by University of Griffith or indeed through any other channel, such as a bookshop or the Web.

Users form a large minority (44 per cent) of the University of Griffith community, a finding that is closely in line with other surveys (for example, a 2005 study of undergraduates at New Hall Cambridge found a 38 per cent penetration rate).

A number of interesting demographic patterns emerge when we look at the data for existing e-book users more closely (diversity is a strong leitmotiv in this article, as indeed in most of CIBER's recent work). For example, existing users are:

more likely to be dependent upon searching other libraries' catalogues;

more likely to be dependent upon publishers' catalogues or web sites;

less reliant on following up references on reading lists;

less reliant on personal recommendations;

more likely to be dependent on Google or another popular web search engine;

more likely to report a worse experience of University of Griffith Library Services;

likely to exhibit very much higher levels of awareness of University of Griffith e-book provision;

much more likely to be male; and

more likely to be a graduate student, less likely to be a staff member.

In fact, as one considers the above, it seems that existing e-book users are relatively independent (or at least this seems to be what they claim) of formal library provision. This is an important point that will be re-visited later in the context of book discovery behaviour.

As might well have been anticipated, age is a good predictor of e-book use (Figure in Appendix), and the extent of this effect is very striking.

The demographics of e-book use are complex, since age, gender, and broad subject interest all interact with one another in various ways. As an example, Figure in Appendix presents the findings of a univariate General Linear Model (GLM) analysis where gender and broad subject were held constant in relation to e-book use (for the sake of simplicity, not all subjects are shown here). For most disciplines, existing e-book users are much more likely to be male than female (i.e. to appear lower on the y-axis). However, in engineering and the social and historical sciences, the gender pattern reverses. Numbers are admittedly too small to make more general claims here, but this GLM analysis does point to the complexity of the demographic interactions and the need to avoid “one-size-fits-all” prescriptions based on a superficial reading of highly aggregated data, as in so much library survey work.

Surprisingly, perhaps, neither status (full-, part-time or occasional), nor regularity of use of print library collections are associated with existing e-book use.

Table of in appendix shows the findings of another more detailed analysis, this time a binomial logistic regression. The intention here is to develop a simple predictive model that speaks to whether or not someone is likely to be an ...