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Academic publishers have called into question the usefulness of existing e-book devices for their target market, claiming students and researchers need more "ability to interact" with the internet and other sources.
This year’s APSBG Conference saw a number of discussions around the rise of digitisation, with keynote speaker Richard Charkin reminding delegates that the debate had gone back as far as "the innocent days" of the 1970s.
David Kohn, head of eCommerce at Waterstone's, gave a confident talk about the growth in demand for the Sony eReader, with 30,000 devices sold - which were "probably 25,000 more than we expected" - and 100,000 e-books downloaded since it was launched in September--also ahead of expectation. Kohn also drew attention to Christmas Day 2008, when more e-books were bought than print books on Waterstones.com. "This is indicative of the amount of business there is in this market," he said.
However, many of those attending the conference, which took place last week over three days in Grantham, felt the Sony Reader, iLiad and Kindle were only truly aimed at the trade sector.
Peter Hampson, field sales manager at Sage, said: "The biggest concern about the portable devices is the ability to interact. The way students access material in a textbook is different to reading a trade book; they are not reading from cover to cover, but rather want to be able to search and browse."
For those reading journals in particular, Hampson added, "cross-searching and browsing" were "crucial" parts of identifying the relevant research papers. "There is also a concern about the appearance of academic content on these readers where there is a lot of supplementary material such as images, charts and tables," he said.
Roger Horton, c.e.o of Taylor & Francis, said the e-book-specific devices were a "peripheral" part of his business, despite having produced more than 20,000 e-books. "Most of our online business is through academic libraries or associated parts of the university, therefore nearly all desk top. So what we do is develop our product for that particular market," he said. "Over the past decade or so we have had lots of solutions offered to us. The reality is users are human beings, and what we end up with will be what suits us best at the time, but we will almost certainly see them develop further."
Neil Broomfield, sales and marketing director for higher education at Wiley, said: "I could see their value for text-based areas, such as history and English Lit, but there are a lot of other subjects were those eReaders wouldn't fulfill the learning needs of the students – say nursing or engineering.
"Clearly there is very strong demand for them [on the trade side] – but I think there are other aspects of learning that are better suited to have a laptop or PC, where people can go online. I envisage students using laptops a lot more and online tools than going down the eReader route. It seems to me if you are going to have something in a digital medium, it's somewhat limiting to just offer them plain text."
The three acknowledged that the devices were at an early stage in terms of their development. "There is a high expectation that as compatibility of formats improves we will see a greater amount of academic content available for devices like the Kindle," Hampson said.
Horton added digitisation was not the main concern, but price models and distribution models, and called for more focus from within the academic sector on those areas.