This infographic came out earlier this month, but I thought it had some interesting statistics on the coexistence of ebooks and print books:
Since getting back to work this week, I've been trying to get caught up on emails and feeds.
Stephen's Lighthouse linked to the top 25 most downloaded titles on Overdrive - which reminded me that I had recently done our year-end database usage stats, and compiled highest-access titles for our Safari Computer Ebooks database.
Our top 12 most-accessed books were:
| Title, Author | Accessed |
|---|---|
| Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours, Fifth Edition, by Rogers Cadenhead | 706 |
| CISSP Exam Cram, Second Edition, by Michael Gregg | 684 |
| CISSP Study Guide, by Eric Conrad, Seth Misenar, Joshua Feldman | 677 |
| The Green Screen Handbook, by Jeff Foster | 577 |
| Java: A Beginner's Tutorial, by Budi Kurniawan | 462 |
| Adobe InDesign CS5 On Demand, by Steve Johnson - Perspection, Inc. | 358 |
| SAP MM HANDBOOK, by Kogent Learning Solutions, Inc. | 356 |
| Microsoft Excel 2010 Step by Step, by Curtis D. Frye | 340 |
| Sams Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours, by Lauren Darcey, Shane Conder | 305 |
| Beginning iPhone and iPad Web Apps: Scripting with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, by Chris Apers, Daniel Paterson | 278 |
| Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example, by Michael Hartl | 270 |
| IT Systems Management, Second Edition, by Rich Schiesser | 220 |
The Safari stats interface doesn't make it really easy to identify this. Finding the number of sessions isn't too bad*, but we have to report the total number of "circulations" for these ebooks - which to me means the number of times each one was accessed.
I was able to run one report that seemed like a master total usage report, which I think indicated that 433 of our ebooks have been "hit" a total of 12,256 times.
Also interesting, if I'm reading these reports right, those 433 books are only about 1/8 of the collection, meaning 7/8 never got touched even once. Also, of those 433, 250 were accessed five or fewer times (totaling 410 circs), and the top twelve books (which all had >200 "hits") have a combined total of 5233 circs. Which means that 12 books account for a little under half of our total activity.
That is shocking, but also should be a fairly good indicator of what the leading technologies are right now (at least for my patrons, and among the selections available in our Safari catalog) - and a good reason to supplement our Safari access with print copies.
*Incidentally, we had 963 patron user sessions for FY11
