The 'big deal' approach to acquiring e-books: a usage-based study

This paper presents the results of an analysis of COUNTER e-book usage reports for SpringerLink e-book collections purchased since July 2008 at the University of Liverpool. The usage reports were augmented with contextual title-level information drawn from Springer's eBooks Title List. The combined data was used to study how usage of e‐books is influenced by factors such as the subject area, the year of publication and the length of time since the collection was acquired. Analysis was performed to simulate the effects of user-driven purchasing to determine whether this model could apply to this type of content. The study concludes that this 'big deal' approach has worked well: all but one of the subject areas have been well used, the number of unused titles continues to diminish each year, older titles continue to attract significant usage, and the cost-per-use is relatively low. The challenge remains to find pricing models that allow more libraries to acquire e-book collections when budgets may be largely committed to journals.