Downloadable e-books reduce printing

My library has subscribed to ebrary Academic Complete since October 2006, and has purchased perpetual access titles from ebrary since March 2007.

In March 2012 we turned on the Download feature. This allows a modest number of pages ((typically up to 40 at a time) to be downloaded permanently as a PDF file, or the entire book to be downloaded to an eReader device or app for a period of 14 days. As suggested by ebrary, we did not turn this latter feature on for single-user e-books because the book would have been unavailable to anyone else whilst it was downloaded to one user for 14 days. See http://support.ebrary.com/kb/category/en/download/.

The initial setup can involve quite a few steps - see http://libguides.liv.ac.uk/ebooks - but once that is done it is quite simple to download books. Top tip: downloading an ebrary e-book onto an iPad always goes down well at Open Days!

I've finally got around to taking a look at our ebrary usage stats and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of users who have made use of the feature: in eight months nearly 20,000 page rages permanently downloaded, and just over 6,000 whole e-books temporarily downloaded to a device. And then I looked at our other ebrary metrics and noticed that the download option seemed to have reduced the number of pages that our readers have printed:

Note that this is on a logarithmic scale because the numbers of pages viewed are enormous, but I wanted to show that the decline in pages printed was not because overall usage had declined, but that it did coincide with the launch of the download option.

Omitting the line for pages viewed we can go back to a linear scale:

"But", I hear you say, "the decline in printing is much greater than the level of downloading, so there must be another reason". But no, those figures are for the number of pages printed, and for the number of page ranges downloaded, or the numbers of whole books downloaded, so it does seem reasonable to conclude that our users are saving the planet by downloading rather than printing. But then of course, we don't know if they are downloading page ranges just to print them out somewhere else. It will be interesting to see if other sites see the same pattern.

Publishers: please provide EZproxy support

A recent full and frank discussion about the relative merits of EZproxy and Shibboleth between Nicole Harris and Dave Pattern (and others, e.g. Paul Stainthorp) can be summarised as:

• EZproxy is great if you start at your library's site or university's portal because then users are authenticated at the beginning of a session and they can link seamlessly from one resource to another whilst retaining that authentication
• Shibboleth (or Athens or OpenAthens) is great if a user starts elsewhere (Google, Pubmed, a publisher's TOC alert) because the user can establish their authentication when challenged, via a WAYF. (And that will become better / more intuitive one day).
• Publishers are evil and are deliberately trying to reduce the usage of their content.

It occurs to me that publishers are probably quite keen to get their stuff read - but they could do much more to support us beleaguered librarians in the use of EZproxy, as they currently do with Shibboleth.

We currently provide "reload this page via EZproxy" functionality via either our LibX toolbar or a JavaScript bookmarklet.

But if I could log into each of my publisher admin interfaces and specify my EZproxy prepend login URL (http://ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login?url=, seeing as you asked) then these sites could also reload themselves via EZproxy.

An off-campus user who has arrived unauthenticated at the publisher's site could then use the site's Institutional Login feature to identify themselves as a member of the University of Liverpool. (Why does a WAYF - admittedly ugly and clumsy as it is - have to be limited to Shibboleth?). The publisher's system would then reload the page that the user wanted, but now with our EZproxy login string added (e.g. http://ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login?url=http://www.nature.com/ instead of http://www.nature.com/). The user is prompted to login to EZproxy and they get access to the content they wanted.

[Edit]
I forgot to mention: this would also make TOC email alerts much easier to use. When a user registered for TOC alerts they could specify their institution and that would mean that links to TOC alerts could include that institution's EZproxy string in the URL so that the links actually worked off-campus without any further action from the user.

Now, I'm a librarian not a developer, but that can't be difficult or expensive to implement. Can it?