It has been four years since three UK academic librarians, frustrated by the high prices, poor availability and restrictive licensing models for eBooks, launched the #eBookSOS campaign. You can read more abour our response to this campaign in our 2020 blog eTextbooks: what’s all the fuss about? The campaign published an Open Letter, calling on the UK Government to investigate the unfair pricing and licensing practices of academic publishers. Although the letter attracted over 5,000 signatures from librarians, academics and students, the Education Select Committee declined to investigate, and the issues highlighted in our original blog post have only worsened.

Since 2020, commercial publishers have continued to hike up their prices above inflation and are moving growing numbers of their eBooks to the more lucrative 1:1 eTextbook model where we need to pay for each student that accesses the book. Sometimes the cost of providing access to one student can run into hundreds of pounds. This means that delivering access to larger cohorts can translate to thousands of pounds for a single eTextbook for one year. For example, during the 2023/24 academic year one eTextbook title cost the library £9,000 for a single cohort of students and and the average cost of providing annual access to a title on the eTextbook model is now over £1,000. Although this model has served us well in the past, the cost of supporting this type of access is becoming unsustainable and is no longer providing the University with good value for money.

For the 2025/26 academic year we will be gradually reducing our dependence on eTextbook titles that are only sold on the 1:1 model. To support you in preparation for this we have invested in a new collection of eBooks from Sage, called Catalyst. This provides access to over 800 titles in social sciences, health and education, 100 of which are already on reading lists. You can browse the collection at the Edge Hill Catalyst homepage. 

A rectangular logo with a plain, cyan background. In navy font the words Sage Catalyst are written. Sage is written in a slightly bolder font than Catalyst.

If you have titles from the provider BibliU on your reading lists, then these are likely to be on the 1:1 model and we would encourage you to browse the Sage Catalyst collection to explore if any of the titles in this package could meet your needs instead.

We also have collections of eTextbooks for Medicine and Nursing, Research Methods, Law and Drama and Performance:

As always, your Academic Engagement team are here to support you as you to move to Sage Catalyst or one of our other eTextbook packages.

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Clare

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