Tuesday, October 18, 2016

This session summarizes how publishers, aggregators, librarians, and end users view the evolving technology, EPUB, an ebook file format with the extension .epub that can be downloaded and read on a variety of devices, and the extent to which they might take an active role in shaping it. It covers: reasons for EPUB’s ascendance among academic publishers and the benefits to end users, how PDF e-books present barriers to innovation and problems for accessibility, findings from a fall 2015 case study at Rasmussen College which sought to test the hypothesis that the demand (and usage) for EPUB ebooks would increase in proportion to the level of awareness of its availability and advantages (it will also cover the surprising pockets of loyalty the researchers found to the PDF format!), findings from EBSCO’s user research regarding full-text linking and e-book formats, promoting EPUB in research instruction, faculty development, and curriculum integration, and more!