HSLS Update

Using E-Books: Their Time Has Come

Electronic books, typically known as e-books, have been around for years, but are only now beginning to gain widespread acceptance. HSLS currently subscribes to about 600 health sciences e-books from companies such as STAT!Ref, Wiley, Ovid, AccessMedicine, and others. Thousands more e-books in all subjects are available to the Pitt/UPMC health sciences community from ebrary and NetLibrary. HSLS statistics indicate that e-book usage is on the rise, and that certain e-books are used quite heavily – much more than their print counterparts were in the past.

All subscribed e-books are cataloged and searchable by title, author, subject headings, and keywords in PITTCat for the Health Sciences http://pittcat.hsls.pitt.edu, making them as easy to identify as print books in library collections. In addition, an alphabetical list of HSLS e-books is available at www.hsls.pitt.edu/resources/ebooks/. On this same page, there is an ‘Electronic Book Search’ option, developed by HSLS with software from Vivisimo, which allows you to simultaneously search the full text of more than 300 e-books using a single query, and receive the results grouped by topic.

There are many pros and cons to the use of electronic books versus print books.

Pros

• Simple and quick online access – no need to travel to the library or be hindered when the print book is charged out to someone else.
• E-books can include multimedia files and hypertext links to other parts of the same book or to related external resources.
• Full-text searching of books offers new possibilities for locating information quickly.
• E-books are easily linked from Web sites.
• Publishers can update electronic books more frequently (though this is not always done).

Cons

• Low resolution and glare makes it difficult to read long passages of text on a computer screen (though electronic ink technology shows promise to improve this).
• Printing an entire e-book is time-consuming and costly
• E-books are not as portable as print books.
• Users tend to read pieces of e-books, sometimes out of context, rather than getting the larger picture the authors intended.
• Many library users like to identify a call number area and browse the shelves to find related print materials, not currently possible with e-books.

The e-book format can be problematic for content that is meant to be read from beginning to end. However, for reference books with disparate pieces of information, such as directories, encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, clinical and drug consult books, and for books that are edited volumes of standalone chapters, electronic versions are not only comparable, but often superior to their print counterparts.

The next time you need quick reference information, consider using an authoritative e-book instead of going straight to Google.

--Ammon Ripple