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Digital Content: Analyzing Demand in the Postsecondary Education Market Image of Noah Carp Author: Noah Carp, Affiliate Analyst A tectonic shift in content use is underway in postsecondary education. Both content adopters and suppliers are in the early phase of the continuum from 100% print content to a significant role for digital content. As postsecondary instructors and other content decisionmakers are increasingly interested in employing new digital formats to enhance teaching and learning, digital content providers, technology vendors, and other companies involved in bringing digital content to colleges and universities are simultaneously shaping a new higher education environment. The most pressing challenges for companies participating in this market are to assess the market opportunities, understand customer requirements, modify existing business strategies, and bring compelling offerings to the market. This report focuses on the demand-side of the market - faculty use and planned use of digital content. It uses primary research of faculty content adopters to identify perceptions and trends that will help shape supplier strategies for digital content. The report analyzes:

Each year one of the biggest debates in higher education seems to be: Is this the year that electronic textbooks take off? Many of the barriers are falling. E-reader devices are getting better. The inventory of digital content is expanding. Business models are emerging to support the needs of students, faculty members, and publishers. People are getting more comfortable with new modes of information delivery and the pervasiveness of technology in our lives. Discussions of the future of digital course materials are now more often about "when" than "if."

This can be deleted, there isn't much data, just speculation about what will ultimately bring about the print-to-digital change in college textbooks.

bob stein

This is not a scholarly article, it is one person trying to relay his thoughts and predictions about the future of publishing. He welcomes comments, and there are several. He discusses a little bit the history of the print to digital transition, like the added interaction between books and authors via author webpages, or a scholars ability to easily access source materials if they are linked to the original article. This may be useful as a historical guide to discuss where book publishing started and how the publishing model is changing.

This is the Table of Contents page of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing website. This Website is an index of citations to articles about various topics related to electronic publishing. For example, Publisher's Rights Issues: Digital Rights Management contains an index of probably 50 relevant articles, print & digital, related to that topic. Do we really need any other source? I'm just going to tag this with our four main categories and we can probably find all the sub-categories within these articles.

This article discusses the cost-benefit analysis of journal subscriptions in research libraries. It also discusses the methodology used to determine whether or not journal articles are actually read and used by researchers. There is some discussion regarding the cost of digital vs. print resources, but the discussion is minimal.

John Willinsky: "This paper reviews and addresses the critical issues currently confronting monograph publishing as a matter of reduced opportunities for scholars to pursue book-length projects. In response, it proposes an alternative approach to monograph publishing based on a modular design for an online system that would foster, manage, and publish monographs in digital and print forms using open source software developments, drawn from journal publishing, and social networking technologies that might contribute to not only to the sustainability of monograph publishing but to the quality of the resulting books."

Fulltext Sources Online is an index published by Information Today, updated weekly online and available twice a year in a print version. FSO "is a directory of over 42,000 full-text newspapers, journals, magazine, newsletters, and transcripts from 30 aggregators and content providers." Subscribers have access to all aspects of the index, while non-subscribers can search for free with only limited access to results.

Jason Epstein: "The huge, worldwide market for digital content, however, is not a fantasy. It will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom."

NYT asks: Do schools need to maintain traditional libraries? What are the educational consequences of having students read less on the printed page and more on the Web? * James Tracy, headmaster, Cushing Academy * Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, English professor, University of Maryland * Liz Gray, library director, Dana Hall School * Nicholas Carr, author, "The Big Switch" * William Powers, author, "Hamlet's BlackBerry" Comments indicate strong belief in the importance of books

Our work aims to foster the further understanding of the significance of digital and analog books and their role in humanities scholarship. We are very grateful that a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) research cluster award made possible the preliminary work presented on the website. Research questions Key questions to be addressed include: * What do we really know about the ways in which we interact with new texts that replace the print artifact and re-present to us the knowledge and experience of the past, as well as deliver the direct-to-digital record of the present? * How do we understand the ways in which we interact with these knowledge objects, and the information they contain? * How do we understand the impact that the confluence of media formats in these digital objects has on our use of them, such that we may best facilitate interaction with the new digital artifact?

On Demand Wednesday, November 04, 2009, 2:15 PM MST 47 Minutes 52 Seconds "

Tenopir & King: "Abstract A recent article by James Evans in Science (Evans 2008) is being widely discussed in the science and publishing communities. Evans' in-depth research on citations in over 34 million articles and how online availability affects citing patterns, found that the more issues of a journal that are available online, the fewer numbers of articles in that journal are cited. If the journal is available for free online, it is cited even less. Evans attributes this phenomenon to more searching and less browsing (which he feels eliminates marginally relevant articles that may have been found by browsing) and the ability to follow links to see what other authors are citing. He concludes that electronic journals have resulted in a narrowing of scientific citation patterns. This brief article expands on the evidence cited by Evans (Boyce et al. 2004; Tenopir et al. 2004) based on the authors' ongoing surveys of academic readers of scholarly articles. Reading patterns and citation patterns differ, as faculty read many more articles than they ultimately cite and read for many purposes in addition to research and writing. The number of articles read has steadily increased over the last three decades, so the actual numbers of articles found by browsing has not decreased much, even though the percentage of readings found by searching has increased. Readings from library-provided electronic journals has increased substantially, while readings of older articles have recently increased somewhat. Ironically, reading patterns have broadened with electronic journals at the same time citing patterns have narrowed."

Another article that can be accessed in full through Science Direct. This article outlines discussions from the 2008 presentation at the NETSL conference. Not an article per se, but perhaps a source for topics to explore and people to interview.

Brantley on rationale for libraries in digital age. Key question: "What issues would cause this institution - the Library - to be created today?" Innovative thinkers weigh in. Role of IT, avoiding replication.

Abstract of 1999 study on hybrid library: "The hybrid library is a term that has entered the parlance of the library and information profession in the past three years. It is viewed as a halfway step towards the fully digital library. In this paper, the history of the concept is outlined, together with the important influence the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) has had in funding hybrid library projects. A proposed model of the hybrid library was developed and was shown to the eLib hybrid library projects. Reactions to the model were obtained. In addition, the paper reports the results of in-depth discussions with the project staff regarding how the hybrid library will evolve. It is clear that the development of the hybrid library depends more upon cultural shift than technological development. There are differences in view of what can be achieved in the short term and how to go about achieving the aims. There is a clear consensus that the library in a location will remain. The hybrid library is a useful model for how the library will evolve. Although currently confined to higher education, the principles are likely to spread to other types of library and information service."

The book is modernity's quintessential technology-"a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page," as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book's turning page competes with the flicker of the screen's twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn't-if we choose to replace the book-what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?