E-book and print book price and desirability for university libraries: a comparative study

The purpose of this paper is to compare the prices of print and electronic versions of the same scholarly titles charged from a university library. This study also examines whether preferences for print or electronic formats differ with disciplines and whether high preferences for the electronic version in particular disciplines lead to tagging of high prices for e-books in those disciplines. This study evaluates association in prices of e-books and their print versions for scholarly books. It also explains trends in gaps of prices of electronic and their print versions over the time to understand changing price policy of e-books with time.

This is a case study analysing and interpreting prices of 717 book titles available in electronic and print versions out of 1248 book titles recommended by the faculty members of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in early 2014. The minimum prices quoted by publishers or aggregators for these books became the secondary data for the study. The research methodology is based on quantitative descriptive and inferential statistical techniques.

The study statistically rejected the hypothesis that price tags of electronic and print versions of books do not differ significantly. E-books are usually more expensive than their print counterparts. They are more highly priced in disciplines, where the users prefer electronic books over the print ones. There is a moderate association in prices of electronic and their print versions; libraries can estimate about the budget which would be required for procuring books in electronic format with the help of price of print version; however, the accuracy of this stipulation would be only 20 per cent. The study has highlighted that 95.4 per cent of the scholarly e-books in English medium are published in the USA and the UK. The university presses of Cambridge, Oxford, Columbia, Princeton and MIT and commercial publishers like Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Ashgate and Springer are the major publishers and providers of the scholarly e-books.

This study provides insights into pricing policy of electronic and their print versions of scholarly book titles for libraries. Thus it may be relevant and helpful for library administrators in informed decision making while developing their collections for books.