Reports
The aims of the FinELib project E-textbooks for Finnish higher education:
- More Finnish e-textbooks would be available for HE institutions
- Good usability of ebooks, for both end users and the library acquisition management
- Lisensing models which will take into account the high usage peaks of e-textbooks
- Finnish publishers would be more aware of the needs of libraries regarding e-(text)books
Project started in January 2014, and the pilot phase was active during August 2015 - July 2016. The project was organized by The National Library of Finland and FinELib consortium, and participants included higher education libraries (both universities and universities of applied sciences), publishers Edita Publishing, Gaudeamus Helsinki University Press, PS-kustannus, and Vastapaino, together with ebook platform provider Ellibs Ltd.
Pilot project included 250 book titles, which were available for the participating libraries to purchase with two different pricing models.
- Simultaneous users
- Packages: 3/5/20/50 simultaneous users
- Valid for 6/12 months
- Each library decides the length of their loan period
- Patrons can make reservations
- Loan tokens
- Packages: 25/50/100/200/400 loan tokens
- Validfor max. one year from purchase
- Loan period pre-determined as 7 days
- 10 min preview (not counted as loan)
- No reservations necessary
National Library also collected e-book experiences from HE students and teachers with two surveys, which were open in January - May 2016.
We hope that the experiences from this project will benefit all, with more publishers selling e-books to libraries, with models that work for all parties.
Further information
Report: E-book Survey for Higher Education Students and Teachers in Finland (part of the E-textbook project)
Licensing models for e-textbooks in Finland. Presentation at Nordic E-book conference, 2.10.2015, Copenhagen, and SLiC eBooks Conference, 9.10.2015, Glasgow.
FinELib office: [email protected]
