Open AccessComparison and Review of 17 E-Book Platforms
Author(s) -
J. P. Lavender,
Courtney McAllister
Publication year - 2020
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
DOI - 10.5703/1288284317162
Subject(s) - library science , purchasing , metadata , download , world wide web , computer science , key (lock) , engineering , operations management , computer security
The University of Michigan Press, with support from the Mellon Foundation, askedJohn Lavender, of Lavender Consulting, to conduct a review of the American Council ofLearned Societies (ACLS) Humanities E-Book collection (HEB) following its launch onMichigan’s new Fulcrum platform. ACLS-HEB is an online collection of over 5,400high-quality humanities books from over 100 publishers. Now that the market for e-bookshas matured, part of the review was a comparative study of e-book platforms run bypublishers, university presses and e-book vendors; 17 platforms were selected. Thereview looked at the key features offered by each platform, how they handled searching,content delivery, displaying results, ability to view and download and other keyfeatures, there was no attempt to judge the value of the content. Following this review,Michigan Press felt that it would be beneficial to share the results with the widercommunity. As well as being of interest to publishers, the review will also be relevantfor librarians making purchasing decisions and vendors selling e-book services. Inaddition to synthesizing the results of the e-book platform review, this paper presentsa librarian’s perspectives on e-book assessment criteria. Courtney McAllister,Electronic Resources Librarian at Yale University’s Law Library, describes theimportance of attributes such as accessibility compliance, library branding, andmetadata. Library collections are shaped by a plethora of concerns and criteria. Thispaper seeks to outline some key elements to consider as part of e-book platformdecision-making.