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.