The E-Book Story: The Key to a Happy Ending

This is an exciting and challenging time for libraries. Libraries are incorporating eBooks into their acquisition, discovery and access environment to satisfy the needs of users. Users want convenience, flexibility and functionality. The ecosystem of eBooks involves a chain of events that leads from the publishing house to the user. eBooks provide diversity for users in which they can checkout, download, search, save, print, email and cite content on their electronic devices without leaving the comfort of their easy chair. Opportunities and complexities exist for stakeholders in the eBook ecosystem. Libraries, publishers, content providers and vendors find themselves challenged by such things as budgets, business models, workflows, technology, licensing, metadata, rights and discoverability. Stakeholders depend on each other to collaborate and share information. It is important that every stakeholder have access to essential information in order to make the best decisions for their institutions. What can each stakeholder do to tackle inefficiencies, disseminate information and support services? There is no one-size-fits-all solution that is best for every stakeholder, but there can be solutions that are mutually beneficial to all that will bring positive results and open dialogue in areas like bibliographic and discovery metadata, identifier schemes, and attempts to standardize vocabulary so that cross-industry collaboration can take place. In order to create viable solutions, we have to understand what are the challenges. This paper will give insight to various challenges that stakeholders encounter in efforts to bring discoverability and access to users, along with problem-solving solutions for managing these resources