Downloading E-Books: FOR FACULTY: E-Books as Course Readings

Question: Is the title guaranteed to be there all semester or over multiple semesters if I want to use it every year?
Answer: Often yes, maybe no.

• Some e-book titles are acquired as ‘Perpetual Access’ or long-term access titles – we buy them, we have them forever, just like a print book.
   
• Subscribing to collections of e-books can make our budget go farther, but they also have the benefit of providing hundreds or even thousands of e-books, often by subject, on one platform.
   
• Unlike perpetual access titles, though, we can’t control the titles within subscription e-book collections. The business relationships between e-book platform vendors and publishers rise and fall, and while new titles are added, they may also be removed.
   
• We have no control over that – we are merely subscribing to the collections – and we certainly have no control over when that might occur. So like information on the Internet generally, an e-book title may be in a collection one day and gone the next – possibly even in the middle of a semester.
   
• Some of our e-book collections combine the ‘Perpetual Access’ titles and the ‘Subscription’ titles all in one end-user platform, so it is not always apparent which are which.

For more information on determining whether we have perpetual/long-term access to a title or a subscription, please see Note 2 located beneath the chart on the right.

Questions:
1. Are publishers’ current/recent titles, especially textbooks, available in these collections?
2. What about the e-textbooks that are being sold to our students?
Answers:
1. Sometimes yes, often no.
2. Definitely no.

• Current editions of print textbooks are not normally licensed to libraries to purchase as e-books, be they as single-user or multiple-user. Publishers' revenue streams would simply dry up were they to sell e-copies of their frontlists to libraries that students could use instead of buying their own copies from them. Even if your students tell you the book is available as an e-book via the publisher's website, note that these are not sold to libraries, but rather to individual end-users only. We also cannot acquire PIN-number-based titles that we can then make available to students. Such titles are for individual purchase and use only.
   
• It varies from subject discipline to discipline, but the e-book titles in Seneca Libraries’ e-book collections are often older titles or older editions of current titles. In that respect, they are what library collections have always been: information resources that supplement what’s in your textbooks.

• Our e-books are a mix of titles from a variety of e-book vendors with a further mix of usage terms and access characteristics that may make the assigning of certain titles as required reading for everyone in a class not possible.

•  If there is a title you want to use for all students in a semester, or from one semester to the next, please contact us well before the semester begins and we can see if we can get it: both ‘Unlimited User’ and ‘Perpetual Access’.
   
• However, we encourage you to look around our catalogue, which features the titles we do currently have, and figure out whether a title will be available for you to use.

• Please refer to the chart on the right which can help you figure out whether a title is 1-User or Unlimited User, Perpetual Access or Subscription, etc.