E-Books in Libraries: A Practical Guide, Edited by Kate Price and Virginia Havergal

E-books in Libraries: A Practical Guide, Edited by Kate Price and Virginia Havergal. London: Facet Publishing, 2011. 327 pages. ISBN 9781856045728.

E-books are rapidly becoming an important format for libraries, and they come with a broad array of challenges. In this excellent selection of separately-authored papers, editors Price and Havergal have brought together many of the issues that libraries face as they attempt to build an e-book collection.  The book is organized into six sections that address the many aspects of e-books that libraries should consider, including the publication, planning, delivery, cataloging, marketing, and future of e-books.

The first section addresses the publication and distribution of e-books. Joel Claypool discusses the challenges presented to publishers as they move into the e-book marketplace. He analyzes the many costs of producing e-books, including editorial, pre-press, manufacturing, sales, and marketing. Anna Grigson follows with a thorough discussion of e-book business models and how they apply to libraries. Other papers in this section describe a project to produce e-books on demand, and how to obtain and manage freely-available e-book collections.

How to plan for and develop an e-book collection is the subject of the second section of the book, with chapters devoted to e-books for public and academic libraries, respectively, and also for further education (i.e., continuing education).  Part 3 is devoted to the delivery of e-books to library users.  Grigson discusses the use of both the web and the library catalog in providing access to e-books, and makes the case that providing bibliographic records for e-books in the online catalog is the best way to provide access to them and make library users aware of them.  Karen Gravett points out that e-books are available through many delivery methods, and these complexities make it necessary to provide some guidance to library users.  She follows by describing methods of providing support, as well as examples of promotional activities to help market e-books to users.  This section concludes with a discussion by James Clay on the information technology challenges presented by e-books, including access management and security.

The fourth section of the book addresses how librarians can engage library readers with e-books, with three chapters focusing on public and academic libraries, as well as continuing education.  In Part 5 each of the book’s contributors describe their vision of the future of e-books in a short essay.  Finally, the sixth section provides a number of appendices including a glossary and a very useful checklist for e-book acquisitions.

Overall, this is an excellent collection of papers on the implementation of e-books in libraries. It includes an index, substantial bibliographies at the end of each chapter, and a supplementary reading list at the end of the book.  It would be especially useful for any library that is considering implementing e-books, or for any librarian who wants to know more about the overall e-book landscape.