2016 Charleston Library Conference

This paper examines changes in readership of Canadian presses Ebooks due to the removal of restrictions by the publishers (DRM).

In 2013, the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and 12 members of the Association of Canadian University Presses/Association Des Presses Universitaires Canadiennes (ACUP/APUC), in conjunction with eBOUND Canada, partnered to provide access via OCUL's Scholars Portal (SP) books platform. The license agreement included a section on Digital Rights Management (DRM) that asked SP to provide access control technologies to limit the use of content and devices. However, the license agreement also included a commitment by publishers to review DRM restrictions on an annual basis and gradually limit them.

Three years into the agreement and several publishers had already removed the restrictions for over two hundred titles. Titles that initially were loaded onto Adobe Content Server (ACS, the technology selected to enforce the DRM) and were limited to one user at a time, are now available with no restrictions.

Our paper will present the results of measuring use for titles that were moved out of the ACS and put onto the SP non-DRM platform. It will examine whether it is true to assume, as one often may, that DRM e-books do not encourage e-reading; has the use of titles no longer restricted by ACS really increased? Finally, it will discuss our strategy to overcome the difference in methods for measuring readership across platforms and technologies, in order to look at the use of specific titles.