High growth expected in e-books

Three-quarters of academic libraries and half of public libraries in the UK intend to increase their collections of e-books over the next year, in spite of the current fiscal climate. These are some of the conclusions of a recent survey in the UK, conducted by NetLibrary, OCLC’s eContent division, which nearly 300 libraries responded to.

In addition, half of the academic libraries who responded to the survey indicated that their use of e-books was to support their core reading lists in various subject areas. The main ones of these were business / management (13 per cent), medicine / health (9 per cent), education (6 per cent) and engineering (5 per cent).