Matthews Book Company and ebrary have joined together to distribute medical and allied health ebooks. Titles are available for purchase under a single or multi user access model. some of the titles include the following:

• Advancing Your Career: Concepts of Professional Nursing
• Mayo Clinic Concise Textbook of Medicine
• Molecular Targeting in Oncology
• Pharmacotherapy Principles and Practice

As of September 15, 2008, more than 11,000 e-book titles are supposed to be available through Matthews. Despite this, it does not appear Matthews and ebrary are ready for libraries to start purchasing e-books.

I went to the Matthews web site and unfortunately you can't browse the list of e-book titles. The only way you can see if something is available electronically is to search by title and if it comes up and says single user or multiple user then it is available electronically. (Example: Mayo Clinic Cardiology) Unfortunately when you click on the title for the single or multiple user version you get kicked back out to Matthews home page, so you have no idea about price or licensing.

According to the press release on ebrary's site, libraries will have the ability to purchase individual titles or subscribe to subject collections. Unfortunately I do not see where customers have that option. Their most recent title list for their Academic Medical Collection is from April 2008 (before the Matthews and ebrary joint venture).

I can't give you any details about pricing or licensing for individual titles or collections since neither Matthews nor ebrary decided to have information readily available on their websites despite going live with the project a week ago.

Electronic books are really becoming quite popular and I think consumer demand is slowly starting to rise. I am always interested in learning more about various electronic collections from different companies. It would be nice to have a specific link on Matthews web site just for the e-titles and collections. I think searching for the e-books individually through Matthews as one would typically search for a traditional print title is a poor search and retrieval method for e-books. It is additionally poor planning not to have the links to the e-books active. Dumping the person back to the main page does not encourage somebody to buy a title. I think ebrary should have updated their electronic textbook list with the additional titles and Matthews information. Their current (April 2008) list is just a PDF, it should not take that much time or effort to create the same type of PDF list.

I will keep ebrary and Matthews on my radar screen for now. Hopefully they will get their act together, update their sites and fix the ordering (i.e. when I click on e-book title, I go to the title not back to the main web page) and I can give you more information. If that occurs soon then I will write an update post.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology