One of the most heard objectives against eBooks ... is that nobody is going to read a whole book from a screen. Especially in the Humanities, [where] long stretched arguments are laid out over hundreds of pages, scholars and students will prefer a solid hard copy over reading from the screen.
Reading attitudes are changing however. ... [A]t the London Book Fair of this year, David Nicolas, a member of the eBooks Observatory research team, said that eBooks have reached the tipping point. The reading behavior of students is changing as they are much less reading the whole book online as they are viewing the book. This means that the whole book is no longer the unit of consumption in an online environment but rather chapters or even paragraphs.
As the preliminary research results of the eBook Observatory project show, people are reading books on their computers. ...
In order to find out if scholars and students in the Humanities will increasingly read monographs online, a lot more eBook content is needed in this field. This is one of the targets of the OAPEN project. ... The OAPEN project might ... create critical mass ... for research about changing user needs, as the JISC survey has done. And as these two innovative projects show or will show, people are reading books from a screen and probably will do so increasingly. And with this one of the main objectives against Open Access eBooks is being more and more contested.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
