Comments on: Most Popular Computer Ebooks (at my library)

By: Swiss Army Librarian » #PLA12 Weeding in the Digital Age :: Brian Herzog

Swiss Army Librarian » #PLA12 Weeding in the Digital Age :: Brian Herzog — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:08:35 +0000

[...] to hear how other libraries balance print and online purchasing – for instance, we subscribe to the Safari Computer Ebooks database, and so have cut back on our print computer books. Tags: collection development, collections, [...]

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:39:41 +0000

@Oleg: I didn’t investigate that far, but it had occurred to me. Although, for our purposes of reporting “circ” stats, it didn’t matter – we don’t connect print-book circ to patrons, or what percentage of patrons account for our print circ (or DVD circ, or CD circ), so it didn’t seem fair to do it for ebooks either. But it should certainly be easier to do with online stuff.

Oh, and speaking of promoting, the most successful tactic we use right now is to put up a sign on the computer book shelves, explaining what Safari is with little “how to log in from home” bookmarks for people to take with them. I am constantly refilling those bookmarks.

@Amy: I think the opposite was true when we first launched on Overdrive – we had so few ebooks, people were willing to download just about anything that was available. Now that our catalog is grown and it’s less of a novelty for our patrons, it would be very interesting to see.

By: Amy M.

Amy M. — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:30:52 +0000

Thanks for this post. With patrons clamoring for e-books, it’s interesting to see how a chunk of a vendor’s collection doesn’t get touched. When my public library *cough*finally*cough* gets e-books, I intend to run a similar analysis on the leisure reading titles.

By: Oleg K.

Oleg K. — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:38:32 +0000

Total hits per book is interesting, but I wonder if there’s a way to identify how many of those were repeat hits by the same person. I know from my experience with tech books, there are two main uses: to look something up (reference), and for learning. The latter requires me to access the physical/ebook numerous times for at least a week or two. Because the system, for privacy (among other reasons) may not track individual users, a visual plot of hits over time would allows you to better analyze use of this database.

The above doesn’t take away from the circ stats, but it does give some insight on the real total number of people benefiting from this service and how they are using it.

In practice, I suppose, most of this info is just interesting to see. Theoretically, however, it might be helpful in determining how you promote the service (and if your promotional effort generates and additional traffic).