Content area
Full Text
Background
Over the past several years, ebooks have taken the academic library by storm. Many ebooks now serve as crucial texts or reference books for some of the most fundamental classes taught in universities. We are also starting to see the influence of ebooks in the public libraries. However, the arrival of ebooks has completely missed a fundamental library function that has existed for as long as there have been libraries. The ability to share books with patrons via interlibrary loan has been largely ignored by ebook vendors and publishers.
Ebooks are here to stay, and rightly so. The ebook has given the library, particularly the academic library, unparalleled flexibility in being able to present expandable and adaptable books for some years now. The ebook's ability to change as new research is developed makes it an excellent textbook and reference platform. Publishers and vendors of ebooks have done a good job of creating user interfaces that make the reading and processing of information from these books rather seamless. There is one area which was until recently overlooked by ebook vendors: the ability to lend the electronic books back and forth through interlibrary loan.
Only recently, ebook vendors and publishers have begun to respond to requests for the ability to share these books with other libraries or with other patrons. Unfortunately, these initial ebook sharing efforts are not user-friendly and are often restricted to certain file types or certain vendor-developed lending platforms. While these proprietary platforms serve a limited need, there is no comprehensive way to borrow or lend ebooks via the traditional interlibrary loan framework. [5] Weible and Sullivan (2012) indicated that the lending of ebooks is greatly complicated by a number of factors, including: the vast array of ebook formats used by publishers, especially those in non-Western countries where PDF and HTML are less commonly used than other formats; and the need to transmit each book chapter as a separate file to the requesting library, making the sharing of ebooks through ILL a labor-intensive process. According to [4] Neujahr (2011), proprietary ebook systems are problematic because readers want to be able to read ebooks on their own...