Reasons for using e-books

Question 4 of the questionnaire provided a list of reasons for using e-books, and the option to enumerate others. People were instructed to check all reasons that applied. Answers are summarized in Table II. Those reasons listed in italics were added by the respondents when filling out the survey.

According to Table II, “available around the clock” and “searchable” were valued the most by those completing the survey. These two features of e-books cannot be surpassed by printed books that rely on a physical facility (e.g. library) for dissemination or on a back-of-the-book index to become searchable. “Timely access to new title” takes the third place in tally since, if compared with printed book publishing, it usually takes much shorter time to publish an e-book when all the procedures are handled electronically. E-books naturally do not need bookshelves, and thus “save space”. As described by Sellen and Harper (2002), digital documents can be easily saved, seamlessly transmitted and remotely accessed. E-books as digital documents can also “allow e-archive or seamless sharing”. For instance, e-books can be shared among the users at different physical locations.

E-books can be published with flexible options such as print-on-demand (i.e. a run size of one or greater) and short run titles (defined by netLibrary as run size between ten and 1,000 copies). “Providing versatile publishing options” seems to be a less viable economic choice for print works. Since e-book production in theory consumes no paper, e-books can “save trees”. E-books can also “have helpful features” that make reading them more enjoyable. For example, annotations can be made and then erased with the touch of a button. Hyperlinks can be created to connect fictional characters, or new terms to a dictionary, or related concepts that appear in different parts of the e-book. Because of the hyperlinked table of contents and other items, “easy navigation” in an e-book becomes feasible. The other three reasons given by the survey respondents (“easy to download”, “professional curiosity”, and “convenient to transport by using palm pilot and the like”) suggest added value as a relatively new medium to carry knowledge and information.

Immediately following Question 4, the survey asked subjects to rank three reasons that they think are the most crucial for using e-books (see Table III).

As with the answers to Question 4, “available around the clock” and “searchable” were ranked highest. Beside these two, no other reasons dominate in Table III. It should be noted that “provide versatile publishing options” and the respondent-added reason “professional curiosity” did not receive significant ranking in this exercise. Although these reasons for using e-books are not exhaustive, they provide some overview of how real life users think of e-books.