«Expectations of the Academic Digital Book»

Abstract

At this stage of development of information society, there is already no doubt of the importance of digital books in the university environment. It is interesting to understand it own development in the book ecosystem, both by libraries and university publishers. The first ones were the real drivers of this format over a decade ago, having a clear strategic advantage for both the management of their collections as for the massive use of their users.. And indeed students have become accustomed to their platforms aggregators searches of books and academic journals, such as e-Libro, are increasingly efficient, fast and complete.

For its part, the Spanish academic publishers have taken much longer and were forced to switch at top speed and to external pressures to the industry itself; an unstoppable shift and exacerbated by the current crisis of the paper book. So, we will try to understand the past, present and future challenges of digital scholarly book from two major parts of its ecosystem: libraries and publishers, and thus see what could be their role in the future.

Bio

Victoire Chevalier holds a degree in Hispanic Studies from the University Toulouse Le Mirail, with a dissertation on the Spanish publishing sector, and she also holds a Diploma in Library and Documentation Science from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She was responsible for audiovisual media library of the French Institute of Madrid before becoming the director of e-Libro in Spain in 2002. Since then she is in constant contact with librarians and publishers and all instances of the sector.