Love ebooks? Hate them?
The library is working with ebrary to better understand ebook usage and needs among college and university students. If you have strong feelings about ebooks, they'd appreciate it if you took a brief Student E-book Survey. Their survey should take less than 20 minutes to complete, and almost all the questions are optional.
Comments
Brandon Karlow said on April 2, 2008 9:04 PM:[link to this]
Ebrary is basically useless. This 10 page print limit and VIEWING limit on books is beyond unreasonable. We paid for the book (by paying for the service). You ought to get to read as much of it as you want. More importantly, you should be able to print out single chapters at the least. Its stupid as heck that I can photocopy a chpter but I can't print one - but the same chapter on jstor would be fine to print.
Kate Carter said on April 4, 2008 10:13 AM:[link to this]
Hi Brandon - I'm sorry to hear that you've been having such problems with ebrary. There's actually supposed to be a 40 page printing limit (5 pages at a time), and no limit on viewing. Could you send me a few titles that you've had problems with so I can look into this further? Kate (kcarter2)
Jennifer Spohrer said on April 16, 2008 2:51 PM:[link to this]
I am a faculty member, not a student, but I am excited about the growing online collections of old, out-of-print books (whether Googlebooks or U Michigan collections). Often it is the only way to get copies to use in class.
However, I have discovered that all e-books are not alike. Facsimile copies that load one page at a time require a very fast internet connection, and I and my students have sometimes found the university networks too slow. My students do like having the documents online, though, since they can work with them anywhere. The ability to print and/or download the entire work or large chunks of it is essential. Hard copies are needed for class discussion, and useful in places where internet access isn't possible. Printing or downloading one page at at time takes too long. Text and facsimile collections both have their uses -- text has the benefit of smaller file size, but long texts are unwieldy for research and discussion if page numbers aren't preserved or some other passage location feature (line numbers, paragraph numbers) introduced.