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To highlight the salient features of e‐books, challenges that arise in integrating e‐books into library and information centers (LICs), e‐books business models and licensing, and future of e‐books.

Discusses the emergence of e‐books and a comprehensive definition for them. Lists various implementations of e‐books, their advantages and disadvantages in LICs and compares select e‐book reader hardware and software with their specifications, requirements and characteristics.

Examines several issues to integrate e‐books into LICs to find workable solutions based on identification, selection, circulation, maintenance, quality assurance, pricing, fair use, standards and interoperability, business models and licensing.

E‐books are a new convergence of various traditional works and functions based on the application of new information technology.

The issues causing concerns to users and LICs can be sought by collaborating with industry to ensure LICs play a continuous role in communication information and act as repositories of knowledge, for the benefit of society.

This paper offers practical solutions for LICs in integrating e‐books in their collection.

Standards are being developed in five primary areas of e‐book development: e‐book formats, digital audio formats, digital rights management languages, digital rights management systems, and distribution and promotion. Each of these standards has technological, economic and social aspects. This article describes some key e‐books standards and discusses how these aspects are shaping the emerging e‐book products.

The purpose of this paper is to present the second part of three inter‐related studies investigating the use and usability of e‐books in higher education based on experiments conducted at the University of Strathclyde.

The research discussed here involved two analyses: an analysis of two e‐book collections in the libraries of the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow and an analysis of a follow‐up study to a web survey into user interactions with e‐books in one of the library's collections.

The follow‐up study found that in general students found that interacting with e‐books in the library collection was easy. Students indicated that their preferred book formats varied depending on the context of their information need. Despite their positive reaction and attitudes towards e‐books, students commented that e‐books needed to be promoted more strongly and that there were limitations with respect to their use.

The study presented here was a small‐scale study based only on e‐book collections from one supplier (NetLibrary) and involved only 18 respondents. While this is considered sufficient based on the discount usability testing concept, generalisation of the results should be made with caution.

The findings should be of value to academic libraries in terms of improving e‐book collection management. This study highlights current attitudes of students towards e‐book in terms of how they interact with them, the features they value and their preferences between e‐books and paper books in a university library.

This paper provides useful information on students’ attitudes towards e‐books.

This article describes the e‐book program of the University of Texas, surveys the state of the e‐book market and e‐book technology, provides e‐book usage statistics for three different consortia, and offers guidelines for e‐book acquisitions, as well as e‐book issues to be considered. Relevant specification, standards, and working groups are explained, as are the future e‐book plans of The University of Texas. The author concludes that e‐books are to printed books, as television is to radio and movies: another format with its own strengths and weaknesses.

This article follows‐up on an earlier Library Hi Tech article on the e‐book program at the University of Texas. It notes changes in usage that have occurred with the addition of e‐book catalog records in the library online catalog, and changes in selection patterns as librarians have gained more experience with the e‐book. It also surveys the current digital information environment, notes the increasing commodification of information, details the e‐book efforts of the Association of American Publishers and examines potential future e‐book directions.

This paper aims to provide an optimization method of workflow for publishing houses and electronic book (e-book) studies in the field of digital publishing.

Based on the studies of publishing houses in Beijing, the present conversion workflow is illustrated using a functional modeling methodology. Then, the workflow is analyzed using 5W1H (why, who, what, where, when, how) methodology and optimized using ECRSI (eliminate, combine, rearrange, simplify and increase) principles. To validate the optimization effect, the workflow before and after optimization are generated and implemented by the ExtendSim® simulation software.

The simulation results show that under similar circumstances, both quantity and quality of the products are improved after optimization, which indicate that the optimization method is effective.

Electronic PUBlication (EPUB) has significant requirements to satisfy the needs of the mobile reading market and to earn increased profits, whereas some e-books are still preserved in a portable document format (PDF). This study results in the enhanced EPUB quality and production efficiency of the PDF-to-EPUB format conversion workflow in publishing houses. Publishing houses around the world can refer to this study to make a similar optimization when handling PDF-to-EPUB.

This research introduces the traditional industrial engineering analytical techniques to the workflow optimization of e-book conversion. Compared with the most of other methods used to optimize workflow, this method is simpler, more efficient and more suitable for e-book format conversion.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the prices of print and electronic versions of the same scholarly titles charged from a university library. This study also examines whether preferences for print or electronic formats differ with disciplines and whether high preferences for the electronic version in particular disciplines lead to tagging of high prices for e-books in those disciplines. This study evaluates association in prices of e-books and their print versions for scholarly books. It also explains trends in gaps of prices of electronic and their print versions over the time to understand changing price policy of e-books with time.

This is a case study analysing and interpreting prices of 717 book titles available in electronic and print versions out of 1248 book titles recommended by the faculty members of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in early 2014. The minimum prices quoted by publishers or aggregators for these books became the secondary data for the study. The research methodology is based on quantitative descriptive and inferential statistical techniques.

The study statistically rejected the hypothesis that price tags of electronic and print versions of books do not differ significantly. E-books are usually more expensive than their print counterparts. They are more highly priced in disciplines, where the users prefer electronic books over the print ones. There is a moderate association in prices of electronic and their print versions; libraries can estimate about the budget which would be required for procuring books in electronic format with the help of price of print version; however, the accuracy of this stipulation would be only 20 per cent. The study has highlighted that 95.4 per cent of the scholarly e-books in English medium are published in the USA and the UK. The university presses of Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton and MIT and commercial publishers like Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Ashgate and Springer are the major publishers and providers of the scholarly e-books.

This study provides insights into pricing policy of electronic and their print versions of scholarly book titles for libraries. Thus it may be relevant and helpful for library administrators in informed decision making while developing their collections for books.

This paper discusses the genesis of e‐books and derives a comprehensive definition from various definitions reported for them. It lists the various types of e‐books with their characteristics and the major players in the market. It also highlights the pros and cons of e‐books, and compares select e‐book reader hardware and software with their specifications, requirements and characteristics. The impact of e‐books on the publishing industry, on libraries and librarians, and digital rights management is discussed. The author concludes that e‐books are rapidly becoming a viable alternative and provide growing advantages over the traditional medium.

The continued presence of electronic books or e‐books has significantly affected the publishing industry in recent years. The growing popularity of the Web and public acceptance of new e‐book technologies is facilitating their spread. However, initial optimism about the growth of the medium has been tempered by a measured uptake of the medium and the withdrawal of some e‐books products from the market. This paper attempts to update the position with e‐books and provide an overview of e‐book technologies by defining types of e‐books, listing their implementations, their advantages and disadvantages, hardware, software, management software and their future. The paper concludes that the success or failure of e‐books depends not only on acceptance by users but also on the publishing industry's ability to see beyond traditional business models. The e‐book readers are still in early stages of development but the hope is that common industry standards will soon be adopted and the medium will reach its full potential.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use and usability of e‐books from the perspectives of users in an academic and research environment.

This study involved an e‐mail questionnaire to survey researchers in the academic and research environment of the Indian Institute of Science regarding their use of e‐books.

The responses indicated that the students tend to use this new technology more often than faculty members and staff. Those who did use e‐books mostly used reference and technical material. The highest response was from the Centre for Ecological Science, followed by the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre, and then the Department of Molecular Reproduction and Development and Genetics. The majority of the respondents have used computers for over five years for a variety of purposes including e‐mail communication, internet browsing and text processing as well as for other advanced uses such as numerical computing and DNA sequence analysis. However, the use of e‐books appears to be very low, indicating a requirement for creating awareness and user education about both software and hardware related to e‐books. Only 37 of the 104 respondents had used the free trial offer from Kluwer and Edutech eBooks during July 2004.

There has been no previous study reported which has investigated users' perspectives of e‐books in an academic and research environment in India using a questionnaire method.