The UK's JISC has announced that, according to a panel at the London Book Fair, a key myth has been shattered by early results from JISC Collections' recently concluded e-books observatory project. During the two-year project, JISC provided free access to 36 core e-textbooks in science, technology and medicine to all UK university students, to monitor their usage patterns.
The presumption that increased e-book usage will negatively affect sales was overturned by the report. Its findings revealed that e-book usage actually had 'no impact' on print sales.
According to JISC, a second myth that looks set to be shattered is that only younger students, the so-called 'Google generation', use the online resources. Usage was actually widespread across all age groups.
The two-year effort is claimed to be the largest e-book study ever conducted, with around 48,000 survey responses and using information gathered from 127 UK universities. The study was facilitated by Ingram Digital Group's MyiLibrary unit, with e-textbooks and content provided by academic publishers including Pearson Education, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier Science, Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge University Press and Thomas Telford. The results from the e-books observatory project will be published in June.
The sales growth and the development of e-books was hotly debated at this year's London Book Fair, with the e-books for academia market acknowledged as being further developed than other areas.
