Ok I blogged a while back ago about ebooks and how they are being used in public, academic, and medical libraries. This is blog is more about my library's experience so far with ebooks and attempting to seek advice or wisdom about ebooks from you (my blog reader).

Originally we decided to subscribe to approximately seven books within Ovid that are heavily used print books. Things like the Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics that are frequently checked out of the library. We advertised the ebooks on our web page. We provided access links to them in the catalog, and we also provided a web page specially dedicated to online books listing all of the online books our library has. We have books from various other online providers such as Access Lange, StatRef, MDConsult, NetLibrary, and Ergito.

While renewing our Ovid account we noticed that the ebooks that we purchased access to through Ovid were just not getting the usage we thought they would. Some of these books are rather expensive for online access and we would have like to see great usage for the price we were paying.

I have two multi part questions:
1. Are online medical books not "there" yet? If so then what is causing their slow entry in the area? Is it format? Do people just hate using the books on the computer and if so would having them available in PDA format be better? Unfortunately my hospital and library (while well repected and thought of) is not heavily into the PDA scene, so my expertise in that area is somewhat limited. From my limited experience it appears that most medical text books available via PDA are really more marked at the individual PDA user, because they are seperate programs you load on your PDA. I have not seen a lot of web sites that offer "checking out" of medical textbooks for PDA usage like some public libraries do with the popular fiction books. Finally, are even medical textbooks on PDAs the answer? Are we just so used to physically turning pages, highlighting and taking notes that we want the real thing? I realize that some online book sites and PDA book programs allow that sort of thing, but is that just not as "natural" as the actual book?

2. Did we not promote our online books enough? We started acquiring a huge chunk of our online books back before our current more user friendly web page (which was launched this past June). Our old web site was not user friendly. We discovered that we had organized the site from more of a library staff frame of mind than from our user's frame of mind. Plus, our old site and grown unwieldy and cumbersome a home page stuffed with links to everything possible. So I am wondering if our crummy old web page hindered our users access to online books despite our best efforts at promoting them. I guess the only way to be able to determine whether our old web site might have effected usage is to look at the statistics since the new site went live. I will have to do that to figure that out....sigh...I hate Ovid's statistic reporting.

Ok I lied I have another question...It came to me while I was typing the second.
3. Are ebooks not there yet because there is no infrastructure for them? By this I mean there is really no giant online database of books that links to full text access. Heck you are lucky if NLM Locator or some other catalog has chapters listed. I think books are clearly lagging in journals is this area. Since there is no real great online catalog in the sky that has at least abstracts and chapter summaries, there is no real way to jump from the citations to other possible books or articles of interest. Ok that sentence is kind of confusing.... Basically when you search for a journal article and it is full text, some databases link the references to either Medline citations or to the full text. Thus you can read a great article and then be guided by the references to another great article. Since there is no database like or as powerful as PubMed for books, then there is no way or very limited ways to jump to any reference that is a book. Is what I am saying making sense? I wonder if they lack of a PubMed like database for books is hindering their online full text usage.

So there you have it, some thoughts on online medical textbooks. If you have any ideas, please share.