Last week I got an email from ebrary as a followup to their recent survey on ebook usage. The following paragraph caught my eye (emphasis mine),
Some of the results were surprising. For instance, patron awareness of e-books has not increased over the last three years and reported usage of e-books has not increased significantly either. What’s more interesting is that the survey results were a direct contradiction of ebrary’s internal usage statistics that show skyrocketing usage of e-books. This contradiction produced interesting discussion between the presenters and audience at Charleston. The leading hypothesis that emerged from the discussion is that students do not realize, or simply do not care, if they are in an e-book or another format, such as a journal, which led to underreporting of e-book usage.
Here's a link to my October, 2006! post where I suggested the same thing: Just what am I looking at?
I didn't get any responses to my question then, but maybe now? What do you think - are students aware of just what it is they're using online? Does it matter to anyone but the vendor?
