edited by Richard Kaplan, London, Facet, 2012, xv +197 pp, £49.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-85604-837-8
Despite its Facet imprint this is in fact an American book, first published by Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association. The editor and all the eighteen contributors, apart from Carole Thompson who writes about Texas A&M University at Qatar, are based in the United States, and their discussions reflect US experience, though rarely in a manner that seriously diminishes the value of the book to readers in Australia. The book is large format, with very generous margins used for occasional quotations or sets of bullet points.
The work is divided into three parts. Part I, E-Books in Context, starts with a very useful survey chapter, The electronic book – Beginnings to the present. The second chapter, E-Book publishing – A view from the industry, though interesting, tends to jump from topic to topic and is not free from an element of hyperbole. Chapter three, E-Book publishing – The view from the library, provides a very lucid overview of how e-books are affecting libraries, and does not minimise the many challenges and difficulties.
Part II, E-Books in Detail, consists of six chapters. The first, E-Books in public libraries, is somewhat curiously the only one in this part devoted to a specific kind of library. It is followed by chapters on Selecting e-books (inevitably also discussing acquisition), Licensing of e-books (mainly in academic libraries), and Budgeting for e-books, all of them admirably clear and full of useful practical advice. The next chapter, the book's eighth, dealing with Cataloguing, locating, and accessing e-books, is probably the only one that some readers may find difficult to understand: we are warned about two-thirds of the way through that “In the following discussion, knowledge of standards for print book cataloging is assumed” (p. 114). The final chapter in the section is a helpful discussion of Assessment and evaluation of e-book collections.
Part III, E-Books in Practice, provides six essays, each about five pages long, discussing the experiences of six libraries, including a high school library which disposed of virtually its entire print collection, a public library, and four university libraries. The ‘how-we-done-it-good’ phenomenon is avoided: problems and failures are admitted, and a range of topics, including marketing of e-books, circulation using e-book readers, access management, and changes to work practices are considered. The essays are all interesting, though some are perhaps too brief to allow adequate consideration of their topic. Five pages provide details about contributors, and there is a detailed index.
On the Amazon.com website, a user of this book, identifying herself as a new library and information science (LIS) graduate charged with building a small digital library, says of it that it “has helped me tremendously”. One can readily understand why. If there were readers naïve enough to be misled by the ‘how-to-do-it’ subtitle into expecting a step-by-step guide to what they needed to do, the numerous complexities of e-books, comprehensively revealed here, would lead to inevitable disappointment. But it would be hard to think of a better work to place in the hands of LIS students and others wanting a comparatively brief, clear, practical, and up-to-date overview of e-books and the challenges and opportunities they provide for librarians.
© 2013, John Kennedy