The eTIPS companion websites – supporting learning and teaching through institutionally published work

Written by Laurence Patterson.

The eTIPS project, sponsored by Jisc, is a collaboration between The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), and Edinburgh Napier University (ENU). eTIPS saw two eTextbooks authored, formatted, and completed by academics and others. The two eTIPS eTexts published offer universal interest for undergraduates and postgraduates, discussing student preparedness for research and project work.

One workstream of the project saw the production and publication of companion websites, which accompanied each eText. For the first book, this is available to view, here:

www.etextbooks.ac.uk/dissertations/

and for the second, here:

www.etextbooks.ac.uk/research-projects/

Whilst acting as a promotional tool – a purchase link across the Amazon network was given, as was a preamble of content – sites offered content beyond what could be found in their respective eTexts. In adding elements of multimedia, asynchronous collaboration, and activities, the project team wanted to explore the degree to which the companion websites might have engaged learning beyond the reach of eTexts alone. The relationship between the two elements was such that a reader could engage with the eText but may then jump online to discover a broader set of knowledge.

Time was taken on the appearance and functionality of sites – the intention, to have them look good, and to work well. The team considered that users should be encouraged to return numerous times – content would be added regularly, and collaboration would be encouraged in discussion forums – the tone and feel of content should be appropriate.

All content on the websites was provided free of charge and, although a link to the sites was given from within eTexts, the reader was not required to purchase a copy before accessing. A chapter-by-chapter summary was provided on each site, typically through a video introduction by the chapter author, and with further linked, relevant resources that would encourage the reader to discover themes in more detail. Each summary would also encourage registered readers to debate themes pertinent to chapter content in the sites’ discussion forum. It was intended that this ‘drip feed’ of both guest lecturer content, and digital artefacts, would enrich the learning experience, maintaining interest beyond the eText, and encouraging return traffic.

Additional materials, more broadly related to the project work of eTIPS, were also added to the websites. In some cases, where colleagues presented at conference, and published research separately, papers, presentation recordings, and published articles, were made available there.

Although the team feel that the addition of rich websites to work carried out across the project is of great value, the success of this approach has been difficult to evaluate. Whilst, through questionnaire response and in conversation, students and academics mention the sites, they mostly do so in passing, acknowledging their intention and their value, to broaden learning. But evidencing any true efficacy for those individuals has not been possible – the eTIPS project timescales too short to engage at a concentrated level with University programme leaders, module leaders, cohorts of students. Website analytics are, on their own, ineffective determiners of why return traffic might increase or decrease.

Creating and supporting online content required dedicated time and professional knowledge, and investment of both should be a consideration for teams considering a similar approach. Whilst the eTIPS project ended in July 2018, the intention of the project team is to maintain support for the companion websites over a further year, and to then review their effectiveness.

Scaling in-house e-textbooks publications at Liverpool: views from the Library and the University Press on the potential for new e-textbooks to be written and future plans

By Emma Thompson, Education Lead, University of Liverpool Library and Alison Welsby, Editorial Director, Liverpool University Press

LIBARARY VIEW: Liverpool’s involvement in the project has enabled us to publish two very different textbooks and has given us an insight into the hows and whys of this type of work. We have had the benefit of working with Liverpool University Press (LUP), so we had all the publishing functions ready to go (although textbooks were a departure for LUP as their focus has been on monographs and journals, so this was a new area of work for them).

As we reflect on the project, and consider what we have learned, we feel better placed to understand the considerations of an institution embarking on publishing e-textbooks, especially the considerations for moving this beyond time limited projects to become business as usual. As with any work we do, it is useful to go back to the fundamentals, so some questioning can help:

  1. Why? It’s a pretty simple question, but why would you do this? It involves time and money so there needs to be a key driver. What’s your purpose in doing this? The purpose at an institutional level needs to be much more than ‘it seems like a good thing to do’. What is the key driver for your institution? The drivers could include:
  • Existing titles do not meet pedagogic needs
    • Perhaps a new and innovative programme needs core materials and there is no good fit on the market
  • To push forward with innovation
    • Perhaps existing commercial textbooks in several subject areas do not offer the type of platform that students need and/or do not connect well with existing platforms that students use, especially the VLE. Do students need to be able to download a book to use on a mobile device in a clinical or workplace setting?
  • Value for money
    • Have expanding student numbers made licencing content from commercial publishers’ poor value for money?
  • Showcasing university expertise
    • Are the key experts in this subject area amongst your staff? Would you rather harness their expertise and support them internally to publish than to lose them to a commercial publisher where the resulting title may be viable for them, but not meet the needs of your institution’s programmes?
  • Attracting prospective students
    • Are there titles that meet the core values of your Institution and may be useful to sixth formers as well as first year students, particularly those undertaking the Extended Project Qualification?
  • Is a commitment to Open Education part of your institution’s strategy? Licenced resources can never be easily browsed by the curious individual, interested in signing up to a course or just curious.

PRESS VIEW:  Throughout the ‘Institution as E-Textbook Publisher Project’, we have been continually thinking ‘how can we take this forward with the knowledge gained from the project’? With Using Primary Sources, there is certainly room for further development as more chapters and archive material can be added, and possibly new subject areas. With Essentials of Financial Management, we can easily update the file and spreadsheets to respond to any changes in the module and subject, making it very much a ‘living textbook’. But what about scaling this up further to create more Open Access e-textbooks for students?

The ‘Institution as E-Textbook Publisher Project’ project has generated many conversations between the press and academics on campus on what we can do to help them create e-textbooks to support their teaching needs and provide valuable Open Access material to students, conversations that are still ongoing. Whilst there are no concrete plans currently on what will come next, from what we have learnt through the ‘Institution as E-Textbook Publisher Project’, we are well equipped to ask the right questions at the beginning of the project, to knowledgeably assess the variety of technology, software and platforms available regarding suitability and long term sustainability, and, importantly, to calculate the necessary investment required, both time and financial, to make a project a success.

The ‘Institution as E-Textbook Publisher Project’ project has shown us the possibilities that lie within Digital Humanities, especially as we reflect not only on what the academic book of the future will be, but also the textbook of the future. This projects marks the beginning of LUP’s Digital Humanities publishing programme, and we gratefully thank Jisc for putting us on this path.

Textbook Marketing

This blog post was written by Alison Fox, Marketing and Distribution Manager, UCL Press.

UCL Press published two open access e-textbooks with Jisc as part of the ‘Institution as e-textbook publisher project’. Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery was in June 2016, and Key Concepts in Public Archaeology in September 2017. To the end of March 2018, content from Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery had been downloaded 30,056 times in 159 countries and territories, and content from Key Concepts in Public Archaeology had been downloaded 6978 times in 109 countries and territories. Though both books have been popular in both the UK and US, both books have been widely downloaded across the world.

In a previous post, we discussed how the textbooks were disseminated; both textbooks are available in a variety of formats, each requiring a different strategy in order to reach the target readership. For this blog post, we’ll concentrate on our open access formats (PDF, HTML and app) and how we marketed the textbooks.

The titles that UCL Press published benefited from a dedicated Marketing and Distribution Manager who has extensive experience in marketing textbooks, and whose role at the Press is to manage the global marketing and dissemination of the c40 books that are produced annually.

Both textbooks are based on popular, well-respected Masters-level courses at UCL, and their publication reflects a UCL Press goal to provide open access textbooks in order to enhance student experience. Open access textbooks provide high-quality educational materials to students, as well as open important research to a wider audience for free. With this in mind, our marketing priorities differ from those of a commercial publisher; and reaching the UCL community is one of our measures of success.

In examining how the textbooks that we have produced have been marketed so far, it’s worth noting that textbooks follow a unique pattern — those who make the decision about which book is used (faculty members), aren’t the same as those who use the textbook (students) or those who make the book widely available (librarians or booksellers). This cycle still applies with open access, and, though there are fewer barriers to reach the reader directly, students still rely on lecturers to signpost relevant reading material, and on librarians to make sure that this content is easily available and discoverable via internal systems. In for the textbooks to be successful in their aims, we needed to reach all three groups.

Adoptions and Reading Lists

The aim of marketing textbooks is to gain adoptions of the books for course usage; in this case, as the books were designed to meet the requirements of UCL students, we needed to ensure that students on these courses could easily access details about the book. We did this by including them on UCL’s Reading List system, ensured that they were listed within UCL’s library catalogues and that sufficient print copies were available to the library, and that the relevant librarians were aware of the textbooks and could promote them to students.

Marketing by Authors/Editors

The authors and editors of both books have helped to promote the books extensively. Activities that they have undertaken have included emailing information about the books to their contacts, attending conferences with materials, and featuring books on their department communications channels and websites. The authors also emailed their students to let them know about the freely available textbook that has been designed to meet the course needs. The open access nature of the book has been helpful in this regard; the authors are more comfortable in helping to promote a free resource.

We have been delighted to receive feedback from the editors of Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, about the wider reputational benefit to the department and the authors themselves; production of the textbook, and the fact that it is open access, has helped to drive the visibility of the department. We are also working with the department to examine ways for details about the book to be sent to all new students, and for materials about the book to be taken to events that the department are exhibiting at.

Marketing to Students

In addition to including the books on reading lists, we produced a number of materials to support the adoptions. These have included flyers, posters and credit-card sized flyers to help stimulate usage, and were distributed by the course lecturers in lectures and via the library. Additional materials are in production for Key Concepts in Public Archaeology for the next intake of students for the linked module.

For both textbooks, we also posted announcements to relevant subject-specific student forums, announcing the arrival of a new open access textbook that may be of interest to readers.

Traditional Marketing Materials / Methods

In addition to print flyers, both textbooks were:

  • Included in our seasonal catalogues, which are distributed throughout the campus and beyond.
  • Listed on the UCL Press website
  • Included in our seasonal newsletters
  • Mailed to subject specialist email lists

Social Media

Each of the textbooks was promoted widely on Twitter by the Press, the authors/editors, and the relevant UCL department. Engagement rates were high, with tweets and retweets by both individuals and institutions across the globe.

Reviews

Although reviews do not traditionally play a large part in marketing textbooks, we were delighted when British Archaeology magazine reviewed Key Concepts in Public Archaeology, stating:

There is a refreshing honesty about the book’s approach – it even recognises that most readers will neglect to read the whole thing, but instead will dip in as and when interest or need arise. Littered throughout with concise and well-chosen case studies, Key Concepts in Public Archaeology could become essential reading for undergraduates and is a welcome reminder of where archaeology sits in UK society today.’

Metadata and Discoverability
Metadata was provided to organisations within UCL (e.g. UCL Library) and externally (the platforms who distribute our content, print distributors, aggregators etc). More on this is available in our earlier post about Dissemination, distribution and discovery of e-textbooks.

Dissemination and wider uptake of Using Primary Sources

This blog post was written by Alison Welsby, Editorial Director at Liverpool University Press.

As discussed in previous blog posts, Using Primary Sources is an Open Access teaching and study resource that combines rare archival source material with high quality peer-reviewed chapters by leading academics. One of the main reasons to publish the e-textbook was to support history undergraduates and postgraduates at the University of Liverpool and to make accessible the rich archive in Special Collections at the University of Liverpool Library. However, as the e-textbook is Open Access, it undoubtedly has appeal outside of Liverpool.

Unlike other Open Access publications by Liverpool University Press, which can be placed on multiple Open Access platforms to ensure maximum discoverability, this e-textbook can only be accessed via BiblioBoard due to the technological features of the e-textbook. This does make dissemination of Using Primary Sources limited and places considerable importance on the marketing activities of Liverpool University Press to continually attract new users to the site.

Following extensive marketing, in particular social media marketing, the uptake of Using Primary Sources has been encouraging, with over 1500 users since launch in January 2017. To date, it has been accessed in 30 countries, from Algeria to Vietnam, and whilst the largest user base is the United Kingdom, the spread of users across the world shows considerable external engagement. It is also interesting to note that when users access the e-textbook, they spend on average six minutes reading and downloading material, rising to eleven minutes during the key teaching months of October and November in Semester 1. The most popular items in Using Primary Sources remain the academic chapters, which suggests that users are using the e-textbook as a study/teaching tool to learn about how primary sources can be used in historical research.

Considerable work has been done, and continues to be done, to implement Using Primary Sources on the reading lists of modules at other HE institutions. We ensured all the non-University of Liverpool contributors had the resource listed on their undergraduate and postgraduate modules (at the University of Georgia, University of Bristol, Durham University, University of Manchester and Keele University, who have it adopted on two undergraduate history modules as well as a postgraduate training module). We have also announced the e-textbooks to the academic community through various list-serves, distributed flyers and given demonstrations of the e-textbook on an iPad at our stand during academic conferences. We have also done considerable social media marketing. Whilst we are unable to contact academics directly about the e-textbook due to GDPR, we have contacted members of our mailing list who have agreed to be contacted about new history titles and products. It was also one of the main revolving images/links on our website’s homepage for over a year, so anyone coming to our website would have seen details about the e-textbook.

Our future plans for promoting Using Primary Sources is to reach out to sixth form colleges as we believe it has great potential to help students on history A-level courses. The University of Liverpool Library plan to use the resource as part of their school and college outreach programme, to showcase the quality of research and teaching at the University of Liverpool as well as the rich resources available in the library’s Special Collections and Archive.

New e-textbook released: Essentials of Financial Management

The e-textbook Essentials of Financial Management has just been released!

Essentials of Financial Management

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Essentials of Financial Management is an Open Access e-textbook suitable for students with limited knowledge of finance and financial markets. It answers the main questions of a corporate entity, such as how businesses finance their activities, how they select projects to invest in, the distribution of net cash flow and, of increasing importance, how businesses manage price risk relating to cost of goods sold or a decline in revenue. In providing invaluable guidance to finance, management and business students, Essentials of Financial Management employs two main philosophies: that finance is a real-life subject and that finance is a numerical subject, which is why this brilliant e-textbook contains real world examples as well as numerous Excel spreadsheet solutions for students to download and use.

 

The cost of creating Using Primary Sources

This blog post was written by Alison Welsby, Editorial Director at Liverpool University Press.

Anyone contemplating publishing an e-textbook will undoubtedly have cost at the forefront of their mind. This blog post concerns the expenditure associated with Using Primary Sources, an Open Access teaching and study resource that combines rare archival source materials with high quality peer-reviewed chapters by leading academics, published by Liverpool University Press and the University of Liverpool Library. The library had subscribed to the platform, Biblioboard, prior to discussions regarding the e-textbook as it provided students and academics with material curated by other libraries and institutions (including The British Library) and gave academics the opportunity to create their own collections for teaching and research purposes. So we already had the software in place to create Using Primary Sources, which was certainly an advantage in budgeting for the project. The remaining costs to create and publish Using Primary Sources are as follows:

  • Commissioning. As part of the contract agreements, payments were made on publication to the General Editor, the Assistant Editor and to the individual contributors for their work on the e-textbook and essays. We also paid external academics to write independent peer reviews of the e-textbook on publication.
  • Acquisition of third party material. We tried to use as much primary source material as possible from the University of Liverpool Library’s Special Collections and Archives department. However, some of the contributors requested material for their essay that was not available in Special Collections, so we sourced and paid for primary source material from other institutions, museums and collections, from whom there was an acquisition / supply of material charge as well as a permission / licence charge. In one instance, we paid for the specialised and high-definition digitisation of a rare and fragile medieval text so that we could include it in the e-textbook. Whilst this was relatively expensive, we considered making this material available for the first time in a digital format and therefore accessible to students as being essential to the aims of the e-textbook
  • Production. This included copyediting and typesetting of each chapter as well as an e-book cover design and logo.
  • Marketing. Many marketing activities have been relatively ‘cost free’ – see blog post by Emily Felton on Marketing Engagement and Creativity. However, we did employ traditional marketing activities such as printing colour flyers, which were, and continue to be, distributed to students at lectures, as well as at conference attended by Liverpool University Press and the General Editor. We also included Using Primary Sources in our seasonal catalogues and created three standing display banners: one for permanent display in the Sydney Jones Library foyer, one for the reception area of the Department of History at the University of Liverpool and one for Liverpool University Press to take to conferences.

However, the biggest cost of all would be staffing costs. The staff members at Liverpool University Press and the University of Liverpool Library working on this e-textbook in addition to their current employment and workload are listed below in alphabetical order:

  • Patrick Brereton (Head of Production, Liverpool University Press)
  • Paul Catherall (E-Learning Librarian, University of Liverpool Library)
  • Emily Felton (Marketing Executive, Liverpool University Press)
  • Heather Gallagher (Books Marketing Manager, Liverpool University Press)
  • Jenny Higham (Special Collections & Archives Manager, University of Liverpool Library)
  • Catherine McManamon (Liaison Librarian, University of Liverpool Library)
  • Karen Phair (Finance Assistant, Liverpool University Press)
  • Emma Thompson (Education Lead, University of Liverpool Library)
  • Alison Welsby (Editorial Director, Liverpool University Press)

The number of hours invested by these people over the past three years is incalculable. At times the project was quiet, as the contributors worked on their essays. At other times, it was the main daily activity and workload of some of the people listed above, often for prolonged periods of time. Special mention must be made to Dr Jon Hogg (General Editor), whose commitment and energy to the project has been essential throughout, and, whilst a six-month research leave was granted during the three years of the project, still had to manage this e-textbook on top of his teaching, research and administration duties. In hindsight, a project manager should have been employed to manage the project once the chapters were completed and sources identified (approximately two days a week for the final two years of the project, increased during intense periods such as the three months prior to launch in January 2017), to support the library in the acquiring and scanning of the primary source material and to take full responsibility of uploading all the material onto Biblioboard. Whilst the project manager would not require a high level of technical expertise, it would be essential they were competent in the digitisation of primary source material and data software platforms.

Authors motivations for writing e-textbooks

This blog post was written by Professor Frank Rennie, University of the Highlands and Islands.

There was no single motivation to engage with this institutional e-publishing process, but among the range of perceived benefits, the idea of being able to get our own academic ideas available quickly and inexpensively out to students was certainly a key incentive. The motivation to design an effective and flexible method for institutional, in-house e-text production was also a strong factor. A couple of the authors had previously worked with conventional publishers and were disillusioned both by the time taken to produce the books, and by the high retail price of the subsequent products, which were felt to reduce the benefit for students. For both e-textbooks we used a combination of texts which were specifically written for each book, together with a re-working of texts which we had earlier written for other purposes, such as course handouts or website resources for students on our modules. There was a secondary motivation to be able to re-purpose earlier work in a new and more accessible format.

For the second book we wanted to experiment with bringing together a small group of academics from different disciplines and with different experiences, in order to create a textbook which had a greater scope and applicability than the views of a single author. Once the preferred authors had been selected, from different parts of the university, we facilitated two “writers’ sprints”. These were one-day-long working sessions during which the team clarified the individual contributions of each author, established how these would relate to other authors’ texts, and then set to work with our laptops in different corners of the room to collate, edit, and generate our respective chapters. Although this did not produce the final version of the draft chapters, it substantially speeded the process along, and the group interaction with colleagues whom we knew but rarely directly worked with, was an unexpected but significant bonus motivation in the production process. We would certainly repeat this methodology for future books, reports, and papers.

An early motivation in the e-textbook production process was the perception of enhanced participant control of the production process, and though this was realised, it comes with a caveat. While the small, tight-knit group involved in the project did enable individuals to intervene to influence the appearance of the final product, this also created a slight drag on the production process and could have been avoided with greater streamlined decision-making. We realised during the process that it is not desirable for everybody to have an equal say in every aspect of production, and this has resulted in a clearer flow-chart of activities, decision-making, and responsibilities which will be utilised in the institutional production of future e-texts.

It is probably also worth mentioning aspects which were not key motivational factors. None of the authors gave any real consideration to gaining any income from either of the publications, although this might be a consideration for future authors and future publications. The key motivation was to have the opportunity to disseminate our academic ideas, perhaps to be able to use these e-textbooks with our own students, and to keep the retail price down as much as possible in order to reach as many students as possible. In each of these initial motivations, the team is very satisfied with the outcomes. Neither was the “fame” element given much consideration, although with the success of the first e-book gaining so much attention in a global market, there was certainly a motivational stimulus to know that the products were of much greater significance than simply for internal use. Working through the production processes of peer-review, proofreading, and design was a rewarding exercise in itself, and this has in turn produced a motivation to explore other topics and forms of academic textual output. There is an appetite among the staff who engaged with this project, and also with other academic colleagues in this university and in partner institutions, to identify further opportunities to experiment with different authors, topics, and academic formats to produce more institutional e-publications.

More information on the e-textbooks:
How to Write a Research Dissertation
Undertaking Your Research Project

Dissemination, distribution and discovery of e-textbooks

This blog post was written by Alison Fox, Marketing and Distribution Manager, UCL Press.

UCL press published two open access e-textbooks with Jisc as part of the ‘Institution as e-textbook publisher project’. The first was Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Published in June 2016, content from this book was downloaded 23,067 times in 156 countries and with 3998 page views of the HTML version in the year to December 2017.This was followed by an HTML edition of Key Concepts in Public Archaeology in February 2017 (with 15559 page views to the end of December 2017) and PDF version in September 2017, from which content was downloaded 4011 times to the end of 2017. They were both also made available for sale in print via traditional retail channels.

Both textbooks are available in a variety of formats, each requiring a different strategy in order to reach the target readership. For this blog post, we’ll concentrate on our open access formats (PDF, HTML and app) and how each of the decisions that we made makes the books more discoverable.

Both textbooks are based on popular, well-respected courses at UCL, and their publication reflects a UCL Press goal to provide open access textbooks to students in order to enhance their experience, something which is captured in UCL’s 2034 strategy. Open access textbooks are increasingly important to both provide high-quality educational materials to students, as well as open important research to a wider audience for free. With this in mind, our marketing and distribution strategies are inevitably different from a commercial publisher, as are our goals and the markets we wish to serve.

Textbooks follow a unique pattern — those who make the decision about which book is used (faculty members), aren’t the same as those who use the textbook (students) or those who make the book widely available (librarians or booksellers). This cycle still applies with open access, and, though there are fewer barriers to reach the reader directly, students still rely on lecturers in order to signpost relevant reading material, and for librarians to make sure that this content is easily available and discoverable via internal systems. In order to reach all parts of this cycle, our dissemination strategy reflected this knowledge – in order for the textbooks to be successful in their aims, we needed to reach all three groups, and work with trusted infrastructure.

In addition to UCL Press’s in-house open access platforms UCL Discovery and ucldigitalpress.co.uk, we also worked with a number of other vendors to maximize the reach of our open access offerings. Many of the platforms that we worked with help to enable discovery via provision of a suite of discovery tools for library catalogues; including MARC records. These platforms included JSTOR and OAPEN. We have also benefited from the assistance of UCL’s library services, who have added the textbooks to the reading lists system, created MARC records, and disseminated these more widely to the library community and made the books discoverable in UCL’s library discovery system.

Other platforms were chosen for their wide reach, and included Internet Archive, WorldReader and Google Books (from Jan 2018). The app versions of the books were made available via the two biggest app stores: Apple’s App Store and Google Play. The apps were created as an experimental format, and downloads of these were low in comparison to other open access formats – why this was may be worthy of additional research at a later point.

We also worked within the traditional publishing trade ecosystem by producing a for-sale epub version, which was distributed to booksellers, wholesalers and library suppliers via NBN International’s Fusion system. An Amazon Kindle version was also available via Amazon, with POD print (both paperback and hardback) available to booksellers, library suppliers and wholesalers.

Metadata was provided to many of our partners via an ONIX feed, which was enriched with additional keywords and information to aid discovery. Our marketing efforts also aimed to reach each of the key audiences using a number of different methods including social media, email, advertising, online campaigns and author activities.

As a small, institutional publisher with the goal of meeting the needs of those affiliated to the institution, and limited resources in comparison to the commercial textbook publishers who have large global teams that include campus marketing teams, many of our marketing activities have been UK-based, with a primary focus on serving the needs of UCL students. However, the open access nature of the textbooks, and the platforms we have worked with in order to distribute the content, allow those who have not been actively marketed to organically discover the publications.

The textbooks were well supported by the editors’ and contributors’ departments, and have been adopted for course usage. For the Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, we produced a credit-card sized flyer to help stimulate usage, and similar materials are in production for Key Concepts in Public Archaeology for the next intake of students for the linked module. Authors have also emailed links to the books to their contacts, attended conferences with materials, featured their books on their department communications channels and websites, and carried out a number of other activities to support the books. We have been delighted to receive feedback from the editors of Textbook of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, about the wider reputational benefit to the department and the authors themselves.

Compared to monographs, textbooks have a longer period in which to gain traction – their usage varies within the academic year, and it is essential to reach lecturers at the right time. With this in mind, we are currently working to identify routes to academics that we have not yet reached, by undertaking market research to reach a much wider targeted course adoption as well as ways to make the books more discoverable via indexing services and dedicated textbook platforms e.g. the Open Textbook Network.

Competitor Analysis: the basics

This blog post was written by Steve Stapleton, University of Nottingham.

Each project that has been part of the Jisc funded e-textbook programme was required to carry out a competitor analysis as part of the early stages of the project work. This blog post talks about the basics of competitor analysis and does so by looking at how we approached our competitor analysis at Nottingham.

The starting point for our competitor analysis was to define the scope of the analysis, or in other words, to define what we wanted to find out about and why. The list below shows the areas we decided to look at, and they can be adapted to other contexts as appropriate:

    • Understand market place
    • Examine and define price point and commercial model
    • Understand licensing options
    • Examine and define pedagogic approach
    • Evaluate quality of competitor texts
    • Understand the current usage by our own students of competitor texts

We were keen to use the competitor analysis to help us understand the market that we were moving into and to help us understand how we might position ourselves competitively in the already busy market of introductory texts in the areas of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSP) and ‘Applied Ethics’. The CSP e-textbook was going to follow a commercial path, so it was important to look at price points and consider where we wanted to pitch our own e-textbook. The Applied Ethics e-textbook was to be offered for free under a Creative Commons licence, so while price point was not a consideration, it was important to examine licence choices of competitors.We also wanted to use the competitor analysis to get a sense of what the existing leading texts in the subject areas offered in terms of pedagogic approach were, so for example were they simply traditional textbooks or did they have any accompanying materials or accompanying websites that supported learning. This was especially interesting to us as the authors of both our e-textbooks were keen to move away from traditional text only approaches by providing supporting online activities. This strand of analysis also included an evaluation of quality of competitor texts. Over 50 competitor texts were evaluated and quality scores allocated by the authors.

The final driver for our analysis was a desire to understand how our own students were already using competitor texts as part of their studies, and what the availability of texts was like in our own library. This was important information to us as one of the key aspects of the Jisc project is to examine if self-publication of e-textbooks can reduce the cost of higher education for students. So it was essential to understand how students were already using competitor texts in order to start to unpick that question. The list below shows the specifics of what we investigated for this aspect of our analysis:

  • Title Author/Editor Publisher
  • Publisher date
  • Versions held by The University of Nottingham Library
  • Price that The University paid for different versions of the title
  • Current open market list price for titles
  • Usage data
  • Other formats available for purchase (not held by The University of Nottingham) and the current open market list price
  • Access to titles or parts of titles through the institutional VLE
  • Academic authors view of the current situation

Several analytical tools and processes were used to carry out the competitor analysis. This included a SWOT analysis for both e-textbooks that looked at what the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats were for the title. The SWOT analysis for the Corporate Social Responsibility e-textbook is included below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to the SWOT analysis, a review of the main competitor books was also completed. For both e-textbooks this first involved defining what the main competitor texts were. The data gathered about this for the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) e-textbook is listed in the table below:

Title Author/Editor Publisher Date
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Werther Sage 2010
The Sustainable MBA Weybrecht Wiley 2013
Managing Corporate Social Responsibility Coombs and Holladay Wiley-Blackwell 2011
The Sustainability Handbook, The : “The Complete Management Guide to Achieving Social, Economic and Environmental Responsibility Blackburn, William R Taylor & Francis 2012

Once the main competitor texts had been defined, the next step was to identify cost and library data on the titles. The data gathered for this for the CSR e-textbook is listed in the table below:

Title University of Nottingham Library Holdings List Price Usage Other formats available for purchase
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Not in central library stock £24.99 No usage data is available as not yet in central library stock ·         Hardback ISBN: 9781118760635 with a list price of £24.99

·         myilibrary ebook ISBN: 9781306140904 with a multiuser licence price of £59.98

The Sustainable MBA In stock as an ebrary ebook £24.99 No usage data is available as not yet in central library stock

 

·         Hardback ISBN: 9781118760635 with a list price of list price £24.99

·         myilibrary ebook ISBN: 9781306140904 with a multiuser licence price of £59.98

Managing Corporate Social Responsibility Not in central library stock £58.50 No usage data is available as not yet in central library stock

 

·         Hardback ISBN: 9781444336290 with a list price £58.50

·         Paperback ISBN: 9781444336450 with a list price of £24.99

·         myilibrary ebook ISBN: 9781283927550 with a multiuser licence of £100.00

The Sustainability Handbook Not in central library stock £25.00 4 copies borrowed a total of 178 times since January 2011 ·         Hardback ISBN: 9781844074952 with a list price £55.00

·         myilibrary ISBN: 9781281105196 with a multiuser licence of £130.48

 

 

For the CSR e-textbook we also carried out a comprehensive review of more than 40 competitor titles to try and understand how they approached the delivery and presentation of their materials. The table in attachment lists the first 10 titles that were reviewed in order to provide an example of the work that was completed in this task.

One result of the SWOT analysis and comprehensive competitor book analysis was the decision on what pedagogic approach would be taken for the e-textbook, with the lead author deciding to embrace and integrate technology. The SWOT analysis had highlighted the potential for using technology to drive home a competitive advantage and the comprehensive review of competitor titles had shown that very few competitors had taken this approach. Producing a technology rich end product became a core principle and requirement of the design of the book. Another result of the competitor analysis was the decision on commercial model, with the lead author deciding to move away from a standard commercial model, and move to a fermium model where part of the e-textbook would be provided for free and the later parts of the e-textbook would be available by joining a professional Corporate Social Responsibility organisation that would make the full book available to their members.

In addition to the pedagogic and commercial decisions that the competitor analysis underpinned, it also helped to define what subject areas and content should be included in the e-textbooks. The lead authors of both e-textbooks made decisions based on content having reviewed what was available in the market. A good example of this is the lead author for the Applied Ethics e-textbook choosing to limit the number of chapters in the book to ensure that only high value subject content for the module they were teaching was included. The competitor analysis had shown that many of the competitor texts including chapters that were not immediately relevant, meaning that students would potentially be purchasing texts that had information they would be unlikely to need. Because of this understanding reached through the competitor analysis, the lead author decided to focus in on only 6 topic areas.

So in conclusion, the competitor analysis was essential to the Nottingham project. It helped us take stock of the current position of the market and helped us to understand how we would like to engage with the market. The analysis underpinned significant decisions that we needed to make in the areas of pedagogy, commercialisation; technology, licensing and content. And it also meant that we felt confident that we were making evidence based decisions from the outset.

 

E-textbooks technology: BiblioBoard

This blog post was written by Alison Welsby, Editorial Director, Liverpool University Press.

For the University of Liverpool’s e-textbook Using Primary Sources, we chose BiblioBoard, a ‘community engagement software for libraries’ which helps libraries, universities and museums curate digital collections of books, images, articles, audio and video for either the public or their patrons.

Before the call for bids from Jisc was made, the University of Liverpool Library had acquired BiblioBoard to provide students and academics with material curated by other libraries and institutions (including The British Library), as well as to encourage academics to create their own collections for their teaching and research needs. As Using Primary Sources is an e-textbook containing a wide variety of material from the University of Liverpool Library’s Special Collections and Archives department, it made perfect sense to use BiblioBoard on this project, especially as additional software would not be required and the BiblioBoard team had already demonstrated the software and its features to members of the library and Liverpool University Press. Another factor in choosing BiblioBoard was the fact there were various ‘exposure levels’: we could curate a collection and make it available to only students at the university, or we could share with our own students yet sell to others. We could also make it available Open Access, which was always our intention for Using Primary Sources and what made BiblioBoard particularly appealing. Design is very important to BiblioBoard, which ensured the collections always looked professional and were user friendly with clear sign-posting. In addition to this, accessibility was of utmost importance and BiblioBoard’s collections can be viewed online both on and off campus on computers, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Nexus tablets, Android tablets and phones. We knew that if the resource was easy for students to access on whatever device they had and looked modern and professional, then there would be more engagement. From the beginning, BiblioBoard seemed perfect for this project and with the e-textbook now complete (although more chapters are continuously being added as this is a living e-textbook), we are delighted with the result.

Like many things, once you have done something a few times, it does become easier, and this is the same with BiblioBoard. The first few pieces uploaded and placed on BiblioBoard were part of a steep learning curve in terms of understanding the process and terminology of the software. However, as we worked on the project further it did become easier. A major plus to working on BiblioBoard was BiblioBoard themselves, who were very approachable, answering our many questions during the curation of our e-textbook and supporting us through the process. In fact, the BIblioBoard team worked hard on developing new features in the software to ensure we created the e-textbook we envisaged (such as linking out from the epub chapters to the documents within the collection).

A major feature of BiblioBoard is the zoom-in facility on the documents and chapters, allowing students to analyse primary source material such as fragile hand-written letters and rare medieval manuscripts in exceptional detail. This not only ensures students have invaluable access to primary material at easy reach but crucially supports visually impaired students. If an institution isn’t subscribed to BiblioBoard, then their students would still have access to the collections that have been made available on an Open Access licence, such as Using Primary Sources. However, if an institution has purchased BiblioBoard, then additional features are available to students and academics such as their own login, saved favourites, bookmarking, personal notes feature and a download content feature.

As previously mentioned, we would certainly choose BiblioBoard again for Using Primary Sources and our aim is to curate more e-textbooks on the site for other courses at the University of Liverpool. Why not have a look at Using Primary Sources and let us know what you think? Send any feedback and comments to ups@liverpool.ac.uk