September 10, 2021

E-Books in the Time of Covid (and Beyond)

Ian Chapman

Decades into the digital age, the Tateuchi East Asia Library remains a stickler for print. Sure, we bow down to the convenience of online journals and the power of searchable databases. We even run workshops on digital scholarship. But for books we kept faith in print—until the pandemic. In a recent online meeting, Tateuchi EAL staff reflected on the challenges and rewards of our e-book encounter over the past year, and on possible future directions. We share here some of that discussion, with a little contextualization.

Pre-pandemic: E-book skepticism

No e-books at Tateuchi EAL? Well, we have long subscribed to databases that contain digital monographs or reproduce large book sets. Our e-book holdings, so defined, run to a very substantial 120,000 titles, compared to around 860,00 for print. But we acquire them as entire databases, not individual titles. These platforms have the benefit of cross-text searchability, but titles are selected by the vendor, subject to change, and usually not searchable in the UW catalog. Critically, all disappear with the cancellation of a subscription. Before the pandemic, we rarely purchased individual Chinese, Japanese, or Korean language (CJK) e-books. Seventy-one Japanese language learning books, acquired between 2016 and 2019, were a rare exception.

Our print-book bias reflects a tacit compact between Tateuchi EAL’s librarians and the distinctive users of our CJK collections. UW Libraries’ English-language materials cater to researchers from freshman to faculty level, each with varying needs and preferences. E-books form an expanding part of that mix. Users of CJK research resources, while also diverse, include higher proportions of graduate students and faculty. Their preferences, especially for intensive reading, have often skewed towards print. Korean Studies Librarian Hyokyoung Yi noted that prior to the pandemic “my assumption was that faculty and students still preferred print for academic reading, whereas e-books were more for leisure reading. . . . I never received requests for e-books before the pandemic.”

To East Asian studies librarians—putting aside our own bibliophilic penchants—print books are ownable, physically and technologically preservable (for centuries rather than decades), sharable via inter-library loan, lendable to community borrowers lacking a UW NetID, and immune to geopolitics and post-publication censorship. We take seriously our library’s regional and national role as a repository of locally scarce East Asian language materials. Tateuchi EAL Director and Chinese Studies Librarian Zhijia Shen summed up ownership concerns as follows: 

Who owns an e-book? We pay a lot to get a book, but we don’t “have” it. What is the perpetual ownership that is associated with the license? In the beginning, we always asked for a CD-ROM copy. Now we all know that’s useless, because without the platform they provide, you can’t access or read them. So it depends on the vendor, the publisher, to maintain all this. That’s always an uncertainty, to librarians and to faculty. They keep asking, “Where’s our collection now?” We’ve spent all the money, but where are the books?

By the same token, like most libraries we have embraced e-journals, whose rent-like subscription models are even more precarious. Users’ enthusiasm for downloadable and printable PDF files was a decisive factor in the earlier adoption of e-journals. CJK e-books rarely offer such convenience.

Technical, commercial, and funding issues have also discouraged e-book purchases. Some CJK e-books require special devices or software, or are compatible only with Windows. Or users must open individual accounts to access library subscriptions. Platforms may fail to meet accessibility standards. More so than for English language e-books, formats vary considerably across languages, markets, and platforms, and as Korean Cataloger Heija Ryoo noted, “We just pick the title. We don’t get to pick the format.” Content and reproductions are of uneven quality. Vendors may focus on popular titles, offering few scholarly works. Japanese Studies Librarian Azusa Tanaka lamented that “academic e-book titles from Japan are limited—there are many manga and novels though!” E-book business models may target individuals rather than institutions, or offer books only in packages. Pricing can be prohibitive, as Hyokyoung observed: “For institutions to buy, e-books are way more expensive than print copies . . . sometimes five times more expensive, if it’s a popular title.” Some funding organizations, such as the Korea Foundation, specify that grants can be used for print acquisitions only, to facilitate inter-library loans.

The pandemic forces change

Fast forward to March 2020. Suddenly COVID-19 sealed off our vaunted print collections. We scrambled to meet the needs of faculty and students. Open access resources gained new relevance. Librarians and providers collaborated to arrange emergency digital access to copyrighted materials: the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service program matched around 40% of the titles in our physical collections, while vendors generously provided temporary free access to many Chinese language databases. Casting doubts aside, we also expanded purchases of digital resources, especially e-books, the area of greatest new demand during the pandemic. E-books offered not only remote use, but quick turnaround from ordering to access. Special funding supported this shift, including from UW Libraries’ COVID-19 Emergency Needs Fund.

Initial emergency responses

Early in the pandemic, Tateuchi EAL’s digital acquisitions closely targeted faculty and students’ emergency needs. Azusa and colleagues helped salvage a spring 2020 Extensive Reading in Japanese (Tadoku) course, partly through the rush purchase of 51 e-books. She also purchased other e-books requested for coursework or research by faculty or students. Unfulfilled graduate student requests prompted Hyokyoung to open a pilot account with the Kyobo e-book platform (see our Autumn 2020 Newsletter). Also in response to urgent student needs, she subscribed to two North Korea news databases, despite reservations about price and reliability. Hyokyoung had long insisted on buying print or microfilm versions of North Korean periodicals, both for their archival value and because she feared loss of access to online versions. Yet in the pandemic these were inaccessible, even via curbside pickup, forcing a new approach: 

That really made me change my thinking as a selector. You think about our users’ needs. . . . This medium, the old printed paper that I religiously care for, no longer served our users during this pandemic. What about all the money that I had poured in? It was useless. . . . I had never felt this terrible as a librarian, in not being able to serve our users. It was a trauma, and a change factor.

Prior to the pandemic, we had been accumulating print books for a new Chinese extended reading course to be taught onsite in the library. With these books now off limits, Zhijia Shen and Circulation & Marking Lead Yan Zhu quickly purchased a subscription to The Chairman’s Bao, a database providing graded reading materials and reference tools. Yan also led a thrice-weekly Chinese Tea Hour to complement this and other Chinese language courses (see the Winter-Spring 2020 Newsletter). Chinese and Taiwanese studies benefited from existing e-book databases and others temporarily opened up by supportive vendors during the pandemic. Zhijia also purchased various English-language e-books and Chinese-language year books in response to urgent user needs.

Expansion

The success of these early acquisitions prompted Tateuchi EAL selectors to purchase additional e-books for the general collection. Over half the 137 Japanese e-books purchased over the past year have been for general use. After the Korea Foundation gave temporary permission to use its grant for digital purchases, Hyokyoung expanded her e-book selections, again from the Kyobo platform; in all the library purchased 483 individual Korean e-books between September 2020 and May 2021. Zhijia has initiated an order for several hundred general-use Chinese language titles from the Taiwanese vendor Airiti.

The user experience

Increased exposure has led to greater acceptance of e-books among both users and librarians. Users appreciate full-text and multi-text searchability, and being able to instantly browse, select, and read books remotely and on different devices. Switching her librarian’s hat for that of a reader, Hyokyoung enthused that “You can literally read anywhere, anytime. On your mobile phone it’s very easy and very accessible. . . . Every time you open a book, you are in their bookstore browsing the collection that UW created for us. If you like it you just get it—so quick and convenient.” By contrast, traveling to a campus library to check out a book is “such a long process.” Heija discovered that for Kyobo’s Korean e-books, choice of device impacts the experience: “In the beginning you have to learn, but then it’s really nice. On a tablet or phone it’s much easier [than on a computer].” With multi-user licenses, sometimes purchased for course use, many readers can simultaneously access a resource.

Work flow impact

Behind the scenes, e-books have considerable impacts, both positive and negative, on library workflows. Delivery speed is an obvious benefit, especially compared with print books shipped from Asia. Hyokyoung remarked that: “Before the pandemic, if faculty requested a print copy, even if we rush-ordered, it would take at least two to three weeks to have that book ready for the person to pick up. But with an e-book, I need 24 hours to have that book delivered. That’s amazing!”

E-books eliminate costs and labor associated with print, such as shipping and handling (including expensive air freight for rush requests), marking (i.e. adding labels and identifiers to books), circulation transactions, reshelving, storage, preservation, and replacement in case of loss or damage. Once initial selection and processing is accomplished, the only remaining task is to troubleshoot occasional service lapses with providers.

E-book vendors’ sites offer certain efficiencies. They assist selection by providing author biographies, tables of contents, sample selections and reviews. They make it possible to combine selection and ordering processes, which for print are separate. Korean Collection and Cataloging Specialist Chuyong Bae finds that overall “individual e-book processing reduces many of the working steps associated with physical acquisitions.”

In other respects, e-book acquisition can compound work. Some problems are transitory, such as developing new skills, workflows, and documentation. Chuyong describes her steep learning curve: “We started individual e-book purchasing after the pandemic. It was a struggle, because I didn’t have any training or information before. I needed to research every step of the process, from StaffWeb, or by talking to [Suzzallo Library] Technical Services staff. . . . Now I feel more comfortable, and have learned a lot from this process.” Chinese, Japanese, and Korean catalogers Jian Ping Lee, Keiko Hill, and Heija Ryoo (respectively) produced a detailed manual documenting the new procedures. Heija commented that “We’re at a stage of routine at this point; things are going smoothly.”

However, some sticking points are likely to persist. Selectors must screen vendors for product quality and long-term viability, and negotiate pricing and terms in opaque markets. Limited academic inventory and marked variations in quality and pricing require them to hunt widely for appropriate acquisitions. Since e-books and print books are sold by different vendors, selection processes are separate and duplicative. After purchase, selectors sometimes need to individually approve UW users’ accounts on a given e-book platform.

Post-selection, e-book processing also presents complications. Heija commented that for cataloging purposes, “It’s really hard to browse e-books. . . . You can’t flip through like a paper book, so it takes longer to understand the subject clearly, to create subject headings.” As Japanese Cataloger/TEAL Serials and E-Resource Librarian Keiko Hill noted, checking details such as illustrations, pagination, and references is slower for the same reason. E-book cataloging is also burdened by additional fields not required for print books. Unlike for print books, few e-book records can presently be copied from the OCLC union catalog, due to low collection levels across institutions. For an e-book with a print counterpart, it may at least be possible to convert or enhance a record for the print version; however, “born-digital” titles are often absent from OCLC, and the publications themselves are less likely to include standard bibliographic metadata. Keiko commented that “I am concerned that if we have more demand for e-resources to catalog at once, I may not be able to produce good records in a timely manner.” Processing e-books also places demands on acquisition specialists, who must document and configure collection records, portfolios, activating links, and licensing information, all within rapidly changing software environments.

Post-pandemic: Will e-book acquisitions expand?

Yes . . .

The past year’s experiment has helped us appreciate the value of e-books and overcome some procedural barriers. The crisis has exercised an undeniable “push” effect, as Zhijia described:

Sometimes I joke that the pandemic kicked us into the 21st century. We were so reluctant about doing electronic. But with the pandemic closure, we had to. . . . We were pushed into it, but now we see the advantages. I think definitely we’ll continue and expand. . . . We were in evolution, slowly moving towards that direction. But then the pandemic made us revolutionary; we had to do it, and just did it. And it was good.

Hyokyoung compared our adoption of e-books to that of digital journals a decade or two ago:

Libraries are typically conservative in holding on to print copies. We probably waited longer, and would have held on to print copies as long as possible. We did that with print journals too, and are still doing some essential journals in that way. The pandemic definitely helped us to change and transform quickly. . . . Look at journals. Ten or twenty years ago, everyone debated [whether to go electronic]. But now who debates e-journals anymore? No-one. e-books were on the way, but this has accelerated the change.

But . . .

Individual e-books will remain a minor supplement to print books, since the latter offer the best prospects for long term preservation. Zhijia stressed our role as a resource repository, working in conjunction with other libraries:

We are an R1 institution; we’re supposed to be a repository of certain archival research materials. We have a responsibility to preserve knowledge for generations to come. That has come into question now. It feels like the whole “e” thing is a time-bomb. Some day it will explode. . . . [Accessing CJK materials] depends on relations between countries. What if relations broke?—what would happen to these electronic resources? For Chinese journal databases, frequently we notice articles disappearing. A scholar can be “taken off the shelf,” and all his work disappears from all the databases. . . . E-resources are wonderful to use; but if we want to worry, we have a lot to worry about. . . . Somebody in the country, perhaps the Library of Congress, should get a print copy of everything. One print copy to be stored in a safe place, to preserve knowledge for the future.

Preservation concerns will also steer Azusa primarily to Japanese print resources:

I am concerned about non-perpetual access to these e-resources. UW holds one of the largest Japanese language collections outside Japan, and I am aiming to develop a secure Japanese collection/repository in this area. Replacing the physical titles with electronic ones is not my goal, at least for now.

Hyokyoung will prioritize print for Korean acquisitions, while continuing to explore electronic resources. She noted that e-book business models are more preservation-friendly than those for e-journals:

Before the pandemic, if possible I would just stick with print, which is safe. It’s tangible—if you bought something it was right there. But compared to e-journals, I feel much better [about e-books]. Once I pay the price of an e-book, I don’t have to pay year after year. . . . I have higher reticence when I have to pay every year for journal subscriptions—when you stop paying, all of a sudden everything disappears.

Readers can expect to see more Chinese, Japanese, and Korean language e-books pop up in the UW catalog, but as Zhijia stresses, “Don’t worry about print books disappearing.” For the foreseeable future, print will remain central to Tateuchi EAL book acquisition. Storage limitations challenge the long-term growth of print collections, but we will endeavor to resolve those. Nonetheless, the pandemic has demonstrated the value of electronic resources, and prompted us to think of ways we can generate our own. As Azusa observed:

While publishers may catch up and start providing more e-resources for libraries to purchase, the libraries also own the unique special collections that nobody else has. It is our mission to digitize and make them accessible to the world, whether we are in a pandemic or not.