Tough Love: Guiding Student Researchers Toward a Better Future for E‐Books

摘要

EPUB has emerged as the standard format for e‐books due to its numerous advantages over PDF, including superior accessibility, enhanced navigation, lighter file sizes, optimization for mobile devices, and support for non‐English languages, to name a few. However, there is little understanding of EPUB’s advantages among end users and little appreciation for EPUB’s potential in academic libraries. This paper provides a literature review and perspectives from a publisher, an aggregator, and end users (higher education library) about solutions that drive increased knowledge and use of the EPUB format for e‐books in the academic library. It will summarize the reasons for EPUB’s ascendance among academic publishers, explain how PDF e‐books present barriers to innovation and real problems for accessibility, and argue that the scarcity of EPUB in the academic library is mostly due to a lack of awareness of its benefits. It will give librarians some ideas on how to begin integrating EPUB into research instruction, and ultimately, it will suggest that both librarians and vendors take an active role in shaping the habits and thus demands of their users.