Introduction: the early days …

In 2002 Essex Libraries were asked by the Co-East partnership (a co-operative organization consisting of all the public library authorities in the east of England at that time) and Loughborough University to host a project funded by the LASER Foundation to investigate the feasibility of providing e-books in UK public libraries. This chapter outlines the project and uses the perspective of collection development to discuss the issues arising from it.

Context

It is true to say that – at the start of the project – the question of collection development was not among the highest priorities on the project's list of things to consider. This was partly because a number of what seemed to be more pressing questions had sprung to mind first – who might use such a service? What kind of device would they use? – but it was mainly because it was not entirely clear that the concept of collection development, as understood by librarians used to the well established patterns of the print industry, could realistically be applied to digital material.

Unlike the academic world, where a growing number of publishers – particularly of journals – had already seen that the digital approach offered an increasingly rewarding way forward, most mainstream publishers appeared to be either unaware of the potential, or – more usually – very nervous of what might happen to their content if made available to the wider world in such an apparently vulnerable format. Having seen what was beginning to happen to the recorded music industry, with peer-to-peer sharing of digital tracks decimating previously fairly resilient income streams, book publishers were perhaps understandably wary of suffering a similar fate.

As a result, the idea that the project would be able to demonstrate that public libraries could provide the same mainstream material digitally that their borrowers expected to find as a matter of course in print format began to look unlikely, to say the least. In fact, it soon became clear that such material – particularly for recreational reading – was very scarce indeed. It also quickly became equally clear that suppliers themselves were not exactly overabundant, and seemingly all based in the USA.