Results
Snapshot of results
We have a colourful new pamphlet explaining some of the key results from our project: click the image below to download, and feel free to distribute.
First two research papers now free to download
Our first two research papers have been accepted for publication in the leading open access journal Information Research. You can download them in full text from the links below.
Available - but not accessible? Investigating publisher e-lending licensing practices
What can 100,000 books tell us about the international public library e-lending landscape?
This paper analyses the results of the two focused studies, and reports significant intra- and cross-jurisdictional differences that surprised even the aggregators who contributed data..!
This paper analyses the large-scale study, drawing on almost 100,000 books across five countries. We find that price and license differences across countries are largely attributable to 'Big 5' publishers, and that prices are largely independent of title age (unless the title is in the public domain) or the rights libraries obtain in exchange. Licence terms are not affected by age either, meaning that the most restrictive terms are often applied to older, less demanded books. We conclude that, by setting terms independent of titles’ value to libraries, publishers may discourage libraries from adding older and less-demanded books to their collections.
IFLA keynote
The elending project's leader A/Professor Rebecca Giblin delivered a keynote address at the 2018 IFLA World Library and Information Congress with some key results from the project. Watch it below:
APLIC talk
A more detailed talk from Rebecca Giblin explaining key findings from the two Focused studies (as delivered at the Asia Pacific Library and Information Conference in 2018) is also available:
We will upload our formal written papers detailing the research findings as soon as the peer review process permits.
Using the interactive dashboards
How to use
Visually query the interactive dashboards by simply clicking or sliding characteristics of interest. Here's a good first query to wet your feet with: go to the Focused Australian Study via the link at the top of the page, then click ‘Hachette’ in the Publisher chart. You'll see the whole dashboard immediately update to show you how availability of Hachette titles on each of the five platforms (and how that compares to availability in physical form).
You can query by as many characteristics as you like. Just make sure that when you want to start afresh, you click the 'Reset all filters' button to be sure you're you’re only limiting your query in the way you intend.
For more details on using the dashboards, see the video tutorials below. There's one for the Focused Studies, and a separate one for the Large-scale study.
Video tutorial: Using the interactive dashboards for the focused studies
Video tutorial: Using the interactive dashboards for the Large-scale study
Downloading the datasets
You can download the whole dataset, or a selected part, by clicking one of the buttons to the right of the data table at the bottom of each dashboard as shown in the image below.
Using (and misusing) these data
Please jump in and use these dashboards and the public datasets we have released - we made them for you! However, please do not take the work out of its research context and use it for other purposes (such as deciding whether to enter into a contract with a particular aggregator). That would be a really bad idea, not least because the landscape has no doubt changed significantly since we collected these data. We also strongly urge against any attempt to de-pseudonymise the aggregators who have provided this data to us in good faith in order to assist the research team and library communities to better understand the e-lending landscape.
What to do if you find something weird or cool
If you find results of particular interest we’d love to hear from you - please get in touch or tweet to @rgibli with the hashtag #elendingproject.
